battles he pointed to Canada as a more eligible field of operations: since it was a field which England, should she be victorious, would be able to add permanently to her own estate when the fighting was done. His views and arguments on the subject were laid before Pitt by confidential intermediaries; and whether prompted by Franklin's intelligence or his own, the great War-Minister put this plan in execution, with memorable consequences. But as the end of the war drew near, and when journalists and pamphleteers began to occupy themselves in forecasting the probable terms of peace, Canada became a leading topic. The question was agitated whether England, since she could hardly expect to retain all the spoils that had fallen to her in the course of the struggle, should elect to restore to France the valuable sugar-islands of Guadaloupe, or the dearly-won province of Canada. On such a question Franklin could not be indifferent. He who had been the first to recommend that conquest was naturally the last man to like the idea of its being nullified. And he had better reasons, based upon longer views. "I have long been of opinion," he wrote to Lord Kames, "that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America; and though, like other foundations, they are low and little now, they are, nevertheless, broad and strong enough to support the greatest political structure that human wisdom ever yet erected." With Canada added, they would be broader and stronger still; and he was led to forecast the expansion of the British race in that part of the world, and thereby the increase of English power in the world at large, in a very optimistic sense. To influence public opinion and the councils of state in favour of his views, he published a voluminous pamphlet setting forth the advantages likely to accrue to England from her new possession in

America. And doubtless the pamphlet had its influence, for he had a good case, and, at all times, a knack of convincing writing. At any rate, by the Treaty of Paris (1763) Guadaloupe was restored to France, and Canada remained, and remains to this day, with England.

Turning from these public concerns to the more personal life of Franklin in England, we may say that if he had not much work to do, every day of the time was well filled. His electrical studies were

not neglected. He had experimental apparatus, mostly of his own invention and his own building, set up in his London rooms; and of the many visitors who travelled thither most came to see the man, but not a few came to see the Wonder-worker. A great many of the best papers contained in his Collected Works were written for the amusement or the instruction of the daughter of Mrs Stevenson, the lady whose house at 7 Craven Street, Strand, was his home and headquarters in England now and later. He was accompanied on this visit by his son William, a young man in all senses well formed to make his way in the social and official world; and father and son made many little journeys into different parts of England, and even as far as to Scotland. In the latter country, it is pleasing to know, Franklin found the welcome which he looked back to with the greatest pleasure of all, and avowed that if he were to choose his life-abode anew, it was there he would choose to be and to abide. They also explored the Northamptonshire countryside whence his own and his wife's forbears had come; and he found some new relations who, albeit in a humble station of life, were worthily maintaining the Franklin tradition of health, intelligence, and character. He also sought the printing-house in which he had worked as a lad, and, standing by the old case, which he himself had used, chatted long and

curiously with the compositors about how things were in his day. On this occasion he derogated so far alas! from the virtues of the Water-American as to send out for a plentiful supply of beer, that he and his fellow-craftsmen might celebrate this reunion in the spirit of true British happiness. On a visit to Cambridge he was received with a great deal of distinction by the learned men of that place, as he was by all learned and thoughtful men wherever he went. Franklin's visit to England was indeed a sort of five-years'-long event, and broken records of the profound impression which his personality made upon all who met him are scattered throughout the social, political, and literary memoirs of that time. He was the subject of a wide curiosity. Great expectations, which it was hard for any man to live up to, everywhere preceded him. Yet none who met him were disappointed, and many were surprised; so wise he was, and so various, so much a perfect man at every point.

More

notable, perhaps, than the admiration everywhere accorded him was the warm feeling of friendship which he inspired in so many of his contemporaries. And those friendships stood the test of time as few friendships do; not only of time, but of historical circumstances that seldom fail to compel estrangement even between brother and brother, or father and son. To refer to this, however, is to anticipate. What has to be said here is that the enthusiasm of some of his friends would be content with nothing less than his settling in England for good. And had it lain only with him to decide, he was more than half willing. But he well knew that no power on earth could ever induce his good wife to face the horrors of a sea-voyage; so he made his preparations for getting home. The feelings with which he left these shores are happily expressed in a letter to Lord Kames, written from Portsmouth in August

1762. "I am now waiting here only for a wind to waft me to America, but cannot leave this happy island and my friends in it without extreme regret, though I am going to a country and a people that I love. I am going from the Old world to the New; and I fancy I feel like those who are leaving this world for the next: grief at the parting; fear of the passage; hope of the future."

ON ARRIVING at Philadelphia, at the beginning of November, he was enthusiastically welcomed by his fellow-citizens. He was, indeed, so much called upon by congratulating friends, and so greatly in request for public business, that he said, in a letter to Miss Stevenson, he would have to come back to England for a little repose. Little as he guessed it, he was to be back in England very soon; and there was not much repose for him in the interval. Almost the whole of the year 1763 was given to a laborious post-office pilgrimage through the colonies, and on his return to Philadelphia he found plenty to do. The whole province was in a state of commotion and dread, the condition of things being between anarchy and civil war. It arose in this way.

At the conclusion of the war between France and England, the Indians had not been sufficiently taken into account. Besides being demoralised by their late participation in the white man's doings, they were in a bad temper at the loss of what had been for some years a sort of livelihood. So they continued the war on their own account and in their own way; to such effect that all along the western frontier, 66 men loathed the very name of Indian" in the year 1763. Among the wild, if godly, Scoto-Irish Calvinists of Paxton, a western county of Pennsylvania, this feeling of morbid repugnance

was reinforced by religious fanaticism. In the eyes of these, Indians were "Canaanites," and as such ought righteously to be put to the sword wherever found. Going to find them, they began conveniently by massacring a small group of harmless (apparently Christianised) Indians, who for about two generations had lived in close neighbourhood and in daily intercourse with the white settlers. Them the "Paxton Boys" killed and scalped on one December dawn, and burned their village to the ground. Those who escaped on this occasion fell victims a few days later, when the same band broke into the building at Lancaster in which the poor fugitives had been placed by the local magistrate for safety. Young and old, women and children, all were put to the hatchet. These outrages created a profound horror throughout the province; yet the ruffians were not without their discreet sympathisers and their smug priestly apologists. Franklin, who had just returned from his tour, virtually took the province into his private charge at this juncture, and carried it, as nobody else could have done, through a most ominous passage of its history. He first used his pen and press to admirable purpose in rallying to the cause of humanity the ineffective virtues of the quieter people, and in putting the respectable sympathisers and apologists of massacre out of countenance. He next, as the need arose, improvised a civil guard of a thousand men, for the defence of a terrified congregation of Christian Indians who had come, led by their Moravian pastor, to seek protection in Philadelphia. By and by the Paxton people advanced, heavily armed and in hunting gear, breathing wrath and tags of Scripture, to take these refugees in the heart of the city and scalp them where they stood. Franklin and his men were prepared to fight to the death if need be; yet he was loath to shed the blood even of a