A Benjamin Franklin Reader (39 page)

Mr. F.:
Ah! how tiresome you are!

The Gout:
Well, then, to my office; it should not be forgotten that I am your physician. There.

Mr. F.:
Ohhh! what a devil of a physician!

The Gout:
How ungrateful you are to say so! Is it not I who, in the character of your physician, have saved you from the palsy, dropsy, and apoplexy? One or other of which would have done for you long ago but for me.

Mr. F.:
I submit, and thank you for the past, but entreat the discontinuance of your visits for the future; for in my mind, one had better die than be cured so dolefully. Permit me just to hint that I have also not been unfriendly to you. I never feed physician or quack of any kind, to enter the list against you; if then you do not leave me to my repose, it may be said you are ungrateful too.

The Gout:
I can scarcely acknowledge that as any objection. As to quacks, I despise them; they may kill you indeed, but cannot injure me. And as to regular physicians, they are at last convinced that The Gout, in such a subject as you are, is no disease, but a remedy; and wherefore cure a remedy?—but to our business—there.

Mr. F.:
Oh! oh! For Heaven’s sake leave me! and I promise faithfully never more to play at chess, but to take exercise daily, and live temperately.

The Gout:
I know you too well. You promise fair; but, after a few months of good health, you will return to your old habits; your fine promises will be forgotten like the forms of the last year’s clouds. Let us then finish the account, and I will go. But I leave you with an assurance of visiting you again at a proper time and place; for my object is your good, and you are sensible now that I am your
real friend.

A similar spoof, even wittier and more famous (or perhaps notorious), was the mock proposal he made to the Royal Academy of Brussels that they study the causes and cures of farting. Noting that the academy’s leaders, in soliciting questions to study, claimed to “esteem utility,” he suggested an enquiry that would be worthy of “this enlightened age.”

Although he printed this farce privately at his press in Passy, Franklin apparently had qualms and never published it publicly. He did, however, send it to friends, and he noted in particular that it might be of interest to one of them, the famous chemist and gas specialist Joseph Priestley, “who is apt to give himself airs.”

T
O THE
R
OYAL
A
CADEMY OF
B
RUSSELS
,
C
. 1780

To the Royal Academy of ******

Gentlemen,

I have perused your late mathematical Prize Question, proposed in lieu of one in Natural Philosophy, for the ensuing year, viz.
Une figure quelconque donne, on demande dy inscrire le plus grand nombre de fois possible une autre figure plus petite quelconque, qui est aussi donne.
I was glad to find by these following Words,
l’Académie a jug que cette découverte, en tendant les bornes de nos connoissances, ne seroit pas sans UTILITÉ,
that you esteem
Utility
an essential Point in your Enquiries, which has not always been the case with all Academies; and I conclude therefore that you have given this Question instead of a philosophical, or as the learned express it, a physical one, because you could not at the time think of a physical one that promised greater
Utility.

Permit me then humbly to propose one of that sort for your consideration, and through you, if you approve it, for the serious enquiry of learned physicians, chemists, &c. of this enlightened age.

It is universally well known, that in digesting our common food, there is created or produced in the bowels of human creatures, a great quantity of wind.

That the permitting this air to escape and mix with the atmosphere, is usually offensive to the company, from the fetid smell that accompanies it.

That all well-bred people therefore, to avoid giving such offence, forcibly restrain the efforts of nature to discharge that wind.

That so retained contrary to Nature, it not only gives frequently great present pain, but occasions future diseases, such as habitual colics, ruptures, tympanis, &c. often destructive of the constitution, & sometimes of life itself.

Were it not for the odiously offensive smell accompanying such escapes, polite people would probably be under no more restraint in discharging such wind in company, than they are in spitting, or in blowing their noses.

My Prize Question therefore should be,
To discover some drug wholesome & not disagreeable, to be mixed with our common food, or sauces, that shall render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies, not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes.

That this is not a chimerical project, and altogether impossible, may appear from these considerations. That we already have some knowledge of means capable of
varying
that smell. He that dines on stale flesh, especially with much addition of onions, shall be able to afford a stink that no company can tolerate; while he that has lived for some time on vegetables only, shall have that breath so pure as to be insensible to the most delicate noses; and if he can manage so as to avoid the report, he may any where give vent to his griefs, unnoticed. But as there are many to whom an entire vegetable diet would be inconvenient, and as a little quick-lime thrown into a jakes will correct the amazing quantity of fetid air arising from the vast mass of putrid matter contained in such places, and render it rather pleasing to the smell, who knows but that a little powder of lime (or some other thing equivalent) taken in our food, or perhaps a glass of limewater drank at dinner, may have the same effect on the air produced in and issuing from our bowels? This is worth the experiment.

Certain it is also that we have the power of changing by slight means the smell of another discharge, that of our water. A few stems of asparagus eaten, shall give our urine a disagreeable odor; and a pill of turpentine no bigger than a pea, shall bestow on it the pleasing smell of violets. And why should it be thought more impossible in nature, to find means of making a perfume of our
wind
than of our
water?

For the encouragement of this enquiry, (from the immortal honor to be reasonably expected by the inventor) let it be considered of how small importance to mankind, or to how small a part of mankind have been useful those discoveries in science that have heretofore made philosophers famous. Are there twenty men in Europe at this day, the happier, or even the easier, for any knowledge they have picked out of Aristotle? What comfort can the vortices of Descartes give to a man who has whirlwinds in his bowels! The knowledge of Newton’s mutual
attraction
of the particles of matter, can it afford ease to him who is racked by their mutual
repulsion,
and the cruel distensions it occasions? The pleasure arising to a few philosophers, from seeing, a few times in their life, the threads of light untwisted, and separated by the Newtonian prism into seven colors, can it be compared with the ease and comfort every man living might feel seven times a day, by discharging freely the wind from his bowels? Especially if it be converted into a perfume: for the pleasures of one sense being little inferior to those of another, instead of pleasing the
sight
he might delight the
smell
of those about him, & make numbers happy, which to a benevolent mind must afford infinite satisfaction.

The generous soul, who now endeavors to find out whether the friends he entertains like best Claret or Burgundy, Champagne or Madeira, would then enquire also whether they chose musk or lily, rose or bergamot, and provide accordingly. And surely such a liberty of
expressing
ones
scent-iments,
and
pleasing one another,
is of infinitely more importance to human happiness than that liberty of the
press,
or
abusing one another,
which the English are so ready to fight & die for. In short, this invention, if completed, would be, as
Bacon
expresses it,
bringing philosophy home to men’s business and bosoms.
And I cannot but conclude, that in Comparison therewith, for
universal
and
continual UTILITY,
the Science of the Philosophers above-mentioned, even with the addition, Gentlemen, of your
figure quelconque
and the figures inscribed in it, are, all together, scarcely worth a

FART-HING.

The most contentious issue when Franklin was negotiating a peace treaty with Britain in 1782 was the treatment of those in America who had remained loyal to the king during the revolution. It was a particularly sore subject for Franklin, who had split bitterly with his son William, a noted loyalist. Should restitution be made by America for the property it confiscated from such loyalists? Franklin ardently (and successfully) insisted not, and he wrote a fable about the noble lion who stood up against such mongrel dogs.

C
. N
OVEMBER
, 1782

Apologue

Lion, king of a certain forest, had among his subjects a body of faithful dogs, in principle and affection strongly attached to his person and government, but through whose assistance he had extended his dominions, and had become the terror of his enemies.

Lion, however, influenced by evil counselors, took an aversion to the dogs, condemned them unheard, and ordered his tigers, leopards, and panthers to attack and destroy them.

The dogs petitioned humbly, but their petitions were rejected haughtily; and they were forced to defend themselves, which they did with bravery.

A few among them, of a mongrel race, derived from a mixture with wolves and foxes, corrupted by royal promises of great rewards, deserted the honest dogs and joined their enemies.

The dogs were finally victorious: a treaty of peace was made, in which Lion acknowledged them to be free, and disclaimed all future authority over them.

The mongrels not being permitted to return among them, claimed of the royalists the reward that had been promised.

A council of the beasts was held to consider their demand.

The wolves and the foxes agreed unanimously that the demand was just, that royal promises ought to be kept, and that every loyal subject should contribute freely to enable his majesty to fulfill them.

The horse alone, with a boldness and freedom that became the nobleness of his nature, delivered a contrary opinion.

“The King,” said he, “has been misled, by bad ministers, to war unjustly upon his faithful subjects. Royal promises, when made to encourage us to act for the public good, should indeed be honorably acquitted; but if to encourage us to betray and destroy each other, they are wicked and void from the beginning. The advisers of such promises, and those who murdered in consequence of them, instead of being recompensed, should be severely punished. Consider how greatly our common strength is already diminished by our loss of the dogs. If you enable the King to reward those fratricides, you will establish a precedent that may justify a future tyrant to make like promises; and every example of such an unnatural brute rewarded will give them additional weight. Horses and bulls, as well as dogs, may thus be divided against their own kind, and civil wars produced at pleasure, till we are so weakened that neither liberty nor safety is any longer to be found in the forest, and nothing remains but abject submission to the will of a despot, who may devour us as he pleases.”

The council had sense enough to resolve:
that the demand be rejected.

After he had concluded a peace agreement with Britain in November 1782, Franklin had the difficult duty of explaining to foreign minister Vergennes why the Americans had breached their obligations to France, which was still at war with Britain, by negotiating a treaty without consulting him. After sending Vergennes a copy of the signed accord, which he stressed was provisional, Franklin called upon him at Versailles the following week. The French minister remarked, coolly but politely, that “proceeding in this abrupt signature of the articles” was not “agreeable to the [French] King.”

When Franklin followed up with a brash request for yet another French loan, along with the information that he was transmitting the peace accord to Congress, Vergennes took the opportunity to protest officially. It was lacking in propriety, he wrote Franklin, for him “to hold out a certain hope of peace to America without even informing yourself on the state of negotiation on our part.” America was under an obligation not to consider ratifying any peace until France had also come to terms with Britain.

Franklin’s response, which has been called “a diplomatic masterpiece” and “one of the most famous of all diplomatic letters,” combined a few dignified expressions of contrition with appeals to France’s national interest. Using the French word
bienséance,
which roughly translates to “propriety,” Franklin sought to minimize the American transgression.

There was little Vergennes could do. Forcing a showdown, as Franklin had warned, would drive the Americans into an even faster and closer alliance with Britain. So, reluctantly, he let the matter drop, and he even agreed to supply yet another French loan.

“Two great diplomatic duelists had formally crossed swords,” the Franklin scholar Carl Van Doren noted, “and the philosopher had exquisitely disarmed the minister.” Yes, but perhaps a better analogy would be to Franklin’s own favorite game of chess. From his opening gambit that led to America’s treaty of alliance with France to the endgame that produced a peace with England while preserving French friendship, Franklin mastered a three-dimensional game against two aggressive players by exhibiting great patience when the pieces were not properly aligned and carefully exploiting strategic advantages when they were.

T
O
V
ERGENNES
, D
ECEMBER
17, 1782

Sir,

…Nothing has been agreed in the preliminaries contrary to the interests of France; and no peace is to take place between us and England till you have concluded yours. Your observation is however apparently just, that in not consulting you before they were signed, we have been guilty of neglecting a point of
bienséance.
But as this was not from want of respect for the king whom we all love and honor, we hope it may be excused; and that the great work which has hitherto been so happily conducted, is so nearly brought to perfection, and is so glorious to his reign, will not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours. And certainly the whole edifice falls to the ground immediately, if you refuse on this account to give us any farther assistance. I have not yet dispatched the ship, and shall wait upon you on Friday for your answer.

It is not possible for any one to be more sensible than I am, of what I and every American owe to the king, for the many and great benefits and favors he has bestowed upon us. All my letters to America are proofs of this; all tending to make the same impressions on the minds of my countrymen, that I felt in my own. And I believe that no prince was ever more beloved and respected by his own subjects, than the king is by the people of the United States. The English, I just now learn, flatter themselves they have already divided us. I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a perfect secret, and that they will find themselves totally mistaken.

With great and sincere respect, I am, sir, your excellency’s most obedient and most humble Servant,

B. Franklin