A Benjamin Franklin Reader (42 page)

In the old long settled countries of Europe, all arts, trades, professions, farms, &c. are so full that it is difficult for a poor man who has children, to place them where they may gain, or learn to gain a decent livelihood. The artisans, who fear creating future rivals in business, refuse to take apprentices, but upon conditions of money, maintenance or the like, which the parents are unable to comply with. Hence the youth are dragged up in ignorance of every gainful art, and obliged to become soldiers or servants or thieves, for a subsistence. In America the rapid increase of inhabitants takes away that fear of rivalship, & artisans willingly receive apprentices from the hope of profit by their labor during the remainder of the time stipulated after they shall be instructed. Hence it is easy for poor families to get their children instructed; for the artisans are so desirous of apprentices, that many of them will even give money to the parents to have boys from ten to fifteen years of age bound apprentices to them till the age of twenty one; and many poor parents have by that means, on their arrival in the country, raised money enough to buy land sufficient to establish themselves, and to subsist the rest of their family by agriculture. These contracts for apprentices are made before a magistrate, who regulates the agreement according to reason and justice; and having in view the formation of a future useful citizen, obliges the master to engage by a written indenture, not only that during the time of service stipulated, the apprentice shall be duly provided with meat, drink, apparel, washing & lodging, and at its expiration with a complete new suit of clothes, but also that he shall be taught to read, write & cast accounts, & that he shall be well instructed in the art or profession of his master, or some other, by which he may afterwards gain a livelihood, and be able in his turn to raise a family. A copy of this indenture is given to the apprentice or his friends, & the magistrate keeps a record of it, to which recourse may be had, in case of failure by the master in any point of performance. This desire among the masters to have more hands employed in working for them, induces them to pay the passages of young persons, of both sexes, who on their arrival agree to serve them one, two, three or four years; those who have already learnt a trade agreeing for a shorter term in proportion to their skill and the consequent immediate value of their service; and those who have none, agreeing for a longer term, in consideration of being taught an art their poverty would not permit them to acquire in their own country.

The almost general mediocrity of fortune that prevails in America, obliging its people to follow some business for subsistence, those vices that arise usually from idleness are in a great measure prevented. Industry and constant employment are great preservatives of the morals and virtue of a nation. Hence bad examples to youth are more rare in America, which must be a comfortable consideration to parents. To this may be truly added, that serious religion under its various denominations, is not only tolerated but respected and practiced. Atheism is unknown there, infidelity rare & secret, so that persons may live to a great age in that country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel. And the divine being seems to have manifested his approbation of the mutual forbearance and kindness with which the different sects treat each other, by the remarkable prosperity with which he has been pleased to favor the whole country.

The end of the war permitted the resumption of amiable correspondence with old friends in England, most notably his fellow printer William Strahan, to whom he had written the famous but unsent letter nine years earlier declaring “you are now my enemy.” By 1780, he had mellowed enough to draft a letter signed “your formerly affectionate friend,” which he then changed to “your long affectionate humble servant.” By 1784, he was signing himself “most affectionately.”

Once again they debated Franklin’s theories that top government officials should serve without pay and that England’s society and government were inherently corrupt. Now, however, the tone was bantering as Franklin suggested that the Americans, who “have some remains of affection” for the British, perhaps should help govern them. “If you have not sense and virtue enough left to govern yourselves,” he wrote, “dissolve your present old crazy constitution and send members to Congress.” Lest Strahan not realize he was joking, Franklin confessed: “You will say my advice smells of Madeira. You are right. This foolish letter is mere chitchat between ourselves over the second bottle.”

T
O
W
ILLIAM
S
TRAHAN
, F
EBRUARY
16, 1784

Dear Sir,

I received and read with pleasure your kind letter of the first as it informed me of the welfare of you and yours. I am glad the accounts you have from your kinswomen at Philadelphia are agreeable, and I shall be happy if any recommendations from me can be serviceable to Dr. Ross or any other friend of yours going to America.

Your arguments persuading me to come once more to England, are very powerful. To be sure I long to see again my friends there, whom I love abundantly: but there are difficulties and objections of several kinds which at present I do not see how to get over.

I lament with you the political disorders England at present labors under. Your papers are full of strange accounts of anarchy and confusion in America, of which we know nothing; while your own affairs are really in a situation deplorable. In my humble opinion the root of the evil lies, not so much in too long or too unequally chosen parliaments, as in the enormous salaries, emoluments, and patronage of your great offices; and that you will never be at rest till they are all abolished, and every place of
honor
made, at the same time, in stead of a place of
profit,
a place of
expense
and
burthen. Ambition
and
avarice
are each of them strong passions, and when they are united in the same persons, and have the same objects in view for their gratification, they are too strong for public spirit and love of country, and are apt to produce the most violent factions and contentions. They should therefore be separated, and made to act one against the other. Those places, to speak in our own old style, (
brother type
) may be
for the good of the chapel,
but they are bad for the
master,
as they create constant quarrels that hinder the business.

For example, here are near two months that your government has been employed in
getting its form to press
; which is not yet fit to
work on,
every page of it being
squabbled,
and the whole ready to
fall into pie.
The founts too must be very scanty, or strangely
out of sorts,
since your
compositors
cannot find either
upper-
or
lower-case
letters sufficient to set the word
administration,
but are forced to be continually
turning for them.
However, to return to common (though perhaps too saucy) language, don’t despair; you have still one resource left, and that not a bad one since it may reunite the empire. We have some remains of affection for you, and shall always be ready to receive and take care of you in case of distress. So, if you have not sense and virtue enough left to govern yourselves, even dissolve your present old crazy constitution,
and send members to Congress.

You will say my
advice
smells of
Madeira.
You are right. This foolish letter is mere chit-chat
between ourselves,
over the
second
bottle: if therefore you show it to any body (except our indulgent friends Dagge and Lady Strahan) I will positively
solless
you.

Yours ever most affectionately,

B.F.

T
O
W
ILLIAM
S
TRAHAN
, A
UGUST
19, 1784

Dear friend,

…You press me much to come to England; I am not without strong inducements to do so; the fund of knowledge you promise to communicate to me is an addition to them, and no small one. At present it is impracticable. But when my grandson returns, come with him. We will then talk the matter over, and perhaps you may take me back with you. I have a bed at your service, and will try to make your residence, while you can stay with us, as agreeable to you if possible, as I am sure it will be to me.

You do not approve the annihilation of profitable places, for you do not see why a statesman who does his business well, should not be paid for his labor as well as any other workman. Agreed. But why more than any other workman? The less the salary the greater the honor. In so great a nation there are many rich enough to afford giving their time to the public, and there are, I make no doubt many wise and able men who would take as much pleasure in governing for nothing as they do in playing chess for nothing. It would be one of the noblest of amusements. That this opinion is not chimerical the country I now live in affords a proof, its whole civil and criminal law administration being done for nothing, or in some sense for less than nothing, since the members of its judiciary parliaments buy their places, and do not make more than three per cent, for their money, by their fees and emoluments, while the legal interest is five: so that in fact they give two per cent, to be allowed to govern, and all their time and trouble into the bargain. Thus
profit,
one motive for desiring place, being abolished, there remains only ambition; and that being in some degree balanced by
loss,
you may easily conceive that there will not be very violent factions and contentions for such places; nor much of the mischief to the country that attends your factions, which have often occasioned wars, and overloaded you with debts impayable.

I allow all the force of your joke upon the vagrancy of our Congress. They have a right to sit
where
they please, of which perhaps they have made too much use by shifting too often but they have two other rights; those of sitting
when
they please, and as
long
as they please, in which methinks they have the advantage of your Parliament; for they cannot be dissolved by the breath of a minister, and sent packing as you were the other day, when it was your earnest desire to have remained longer together.

You fairly acknowledge that the late war terminated quite contrary to your expectation. Your expectation was ill founded; for you would not believe your old friend, who told you repeatedly that by those measures England would lose her colonies, as Epictetus warned in vain his master that he would break his leg. You believed rather the tales you heard of our poltroonery and impotence of body and mind. Do you not remember the story you told me of the Scotch sergeant, who met with a party of forty American soldiers, and though alone disarmed them all and brought them in prisoners; a story almost as improbable as that of the Irishman, who pretended to have alone taken and brought in five of the enemy, by
surrounding
them. And yet, my friend, sensible and judicious as you are, but partaking of the general infatuation, you seemed to believe it. The word general puts me in mind of a general, your general Clarke, who had the folly to say in my hearing at Sir John Pringle’s, that with a thousand British grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the males partly by force and partly by a little coaxing. It is plain he took us for a species of animals very little superior to brutes. The Parliament too believed the stories of another foolish general, I forget his name, that the Yankees never
felt bold.
Yankee was understood to be a sort of yahoo, and the Parliament did not think the petitions of such creatures were fit to be received and read in so wise an assembly.

What was the consequence of this monstrous pride and insolence? You first send small armies to subdue us, believing them more than sufficient, but soon found yourselves obliged to send greater; these whenever they ventured to penetrate our country beyond the protection of their ships, were either repulsed and obliged to scamper out, or were surrounded, beaten, and taken prisoners.

An American planter who had never seen Europe, was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers. Your contempt of our understandings in comparison with your own appeared to be not much better founded than that of our courage, if we may judge by this circumstance, that in whatever court of Europe a Yankee negotiator appeared, the wise British minister was put in a passion, picked a quarrel with your friends, and was sent home with a flea in his ear.

But after all my dear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our success to any superiority in any of those points. I am too well acquainted with all the springs and levers of our machine, not to see that our human means were unequal to our undertaking, and that if it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of providence in which we had faith we must have been ruined. If I had ever before been an atheist I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a deity. It is he who abases the proud and favors the humble! May we never forget his goodness to us, and may our future conduct manifest our gratitude.

But let us leave these serious reflections and converse with our usual pleasantry. I remember your observing once to me, as we sat together in the House of Commons, that no two journeymen printers within your knowledge had met with such success in the world as ourselves. You were then at the head of your profession, and soon afterward became a member of that Parliament. I was an agent for a few provinces and now act for them all. But we have risen by different modes. I as a republican printer, always liked a form well
planed down;
being averse to those
overbearing
letters that hold their heads so
high
as to hinder their neighbors from
appearing.
You as a monarchist chose to work upon
crown
paper, and found it profitable; while I worked upon
pro-patria
(often indeed called fools-cap) with no less advantage. Both our
heaps hold out
very well, and we seem likely to make a pretty good day’s work of it. With regard to public affairs, (to continue in the same stile) it seems to me that the compositors in your chapel do not
cast off their copy
well, nor perfectly understand
imposing,
their
forms
too are continually pestered by the
outs,
and
doubles,
that are not easy to be corrected. And I think they were wrong in laying aside some
faces,
and particularly certain
head-pieces,
that would have been both useful and ornamental. But, courage! The business may still flourish with good management; and the master become as rich as any of the company.

By the way, the rapid growth and extension of the English language in America, must become greatly advantageous to the booksellers, and holders of copy rights in England. A vast audience is assembling there for English authors, ancient, present and future, our people doubling every twenty years; and this will demand large, and of course profitable, impressions of your most valuable books. I would therefore if I possessed such rights, entail them, if such a thing be practicable, upon my posterity; for their worth will be continually augmenting. This may look a little like advice, and yet I have drank no Madeira these ten months. The subject however leads me to another thought, which is, that you do wrong to discourage the emigration of Englishmen to America. In my piece on population, I have proved, I think, that emigration does not diminish but multiplies a nation. You will not have fewer at home for those that go abroad, and as every man who comes among us, and takes up a piece of land, becomes a citizen, and by our constitution has a voice in elections and a share in the government of the country, why should you be against acquiring by this fair means a repossession of it, and leave it to be taken by foreigners of all nations and languages who by their numbers may drown and stifle the English, which otherwise would probably become in the course of two centuries the most extensive language in the world, the Spanish only excepted. It is a fact that the Irish emigrants and their children are now in possession of the government of Pennsylvania, by their majority in the assembly, as well as of a great part of the territory; and I remember well the first ship that brought any of them over. I am ever, my dear friend,