IRLF 
 
 CO 
 CJT; 
 
GIFT OF 
 
1913 
 
 A RECALL OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
 
 AN ADDRESS BY THE 
 
 HON. JOSEPH BUFFINGTON, LLD. 
 
 Judge of the Third Circuit Court of the United States 
 
 DELIVERED AT LANCASTER, PA., ON JUNE 12, 1912, BEFORE 
 
 THETA CHAPTER OF PENNSYLVANIA OF THE PHI BETA 
 
 KAPPA SOCIETY, IN CONNECTION WITH 
 
 FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL COLLEGE 
 
 fRESS OF 
 (HI NEW ERA PRINTING COMPArtf 
 
A RECALL OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN 
 
 AN ADDRESS BY THE 
 
 HON. JOSEPH BUFFINGTON, LLD. 
 
 Judge of the Third Circuit Court of the United States 
 
 DELIVERED AT LANCASTER, PA., ON JUNE 12, 1912, BEFORE 
 
 THETA CHAPTER OF PENNSYLVANIA OF THE PHI BETA 
 
 KAPPA SOCIETY, IN CONNECTION WITH 
 
 FRANKLIN AND MARSHALL COLLEGE 
 
 COM** IMENTS OF THPTA CHAPTER 
 OF PENNSYLVANIA. P& BETA KAPPA 
 IETY !N CONNECTION WITH 
 
 ;LIN 
 
 PARY. 
 

A RECALL OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 
 
 HON. JOSEPH BUFFINGTON. 
 
 The greatest romance of the new world is the actual life of 
 Benjamin Franklin, for that life was the dream of new world 
 possibilities reduced to reality. A seventeen-year-old appren 
 tice ; a runaway from a colony where he was too well known to 
 longer remain; a penniless stranger in another where he 
 started his life anew without acquaintances, friends or influ 
 ence; an unaided maker of fame and fortune for himself at 
 forty-two years of age; a man of tremendous executive capac 
 ity and money-amassing possibilities, he retired at that age on 
 a fair competence and became a contemplative philosopher; 
 thenceforth the giver of his life to the lives of his fellow men 
 the energizing magnet around which all the altruism of the 
 most free-thought community in America centered. The 
 corner-stone layer of that colonial union on which many claim 
 the nation was subsequently built. A scientist whom the 
 world recognized and revered. The first great teacher through 
 the press of practical life its habits, its sanity, and its econ 
 omies. An inventor of things that pertain to the necessities 
 of life, who refused to lay fhe~ tribute of monopoly therefor 
 upon his fellows. At fifty-one the solitary representative, in 
 the alien and indifferent atmosphere of England, of colonial 
 rights. A lonely prophet in an old world ignorant of the fu 
 ture of an unknown new world. At seventy, a signer of our 
 Declaration of Independence. At seventy-two the all-power 
 ful advocate of weak and struggling colonies in the imperial 
 
 3 
 
 257204 
 
4 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 court of France. At seventy-seven, a far-seeing maker and 
 signatory to the Treaty of Paris. At eighty-one, a maker of 
 our Constitution neighbor, publicist, author, teacher, scien 
 tist, prophet, humanist, philosopher, humanitarian, patriot 
 and statesman. His story reads like the fantasies of a ro 
 mance, but its truth outvies fiction. It has been well said: 
 " Great men need not that we praise them ; the need is ours 
 that we know them." And in that spirit of turning our 
 thoughts to and drawing a lesson from the life of one of the 
 world s great, I ask you to join with me to-night in a brief re 
 call of Benjamin Franklin. Great he was. Great he has been 
 for a century and great the future will hold him. The world 
 does not deceive itself. It takes a really great man to be a 
 great man. It takes such a man to remain great to the end of 
 his life; but if the man is great and proves himself great to 
 the close of his life, posterity will as distance comes turn with 
 deeper reverence to a greatness that instead of disappearing 
 with time is only more clearly outlined. And it is this great 
 ness of the passing years that makes the recall of the really 
 great the Franklins, the Washingtons and the Lincolns so 
 profitable. The world recognizes too that greatness is a 
 growth. Mere notoriety, like a gourd, may spring up in a 
 night, but national reverence of a man s character is a thing 
 of years. Like an oak it is not of a night, but is the gathering, 
 silent, insistent call of a contemplative century. For when 
 the world has looked up to one of its leaders as an oak tower 
 ing high and rooted deep, and when like that oak that great 
 man has weathered the gale of a century s criticism and 
 cynicism, and the century s end still finds his name at the 
 head of the roll call of its immortals, there can be no doubt 
 that its verdict is just. Such has been the case with Franklin. 
 Time and distance, instead of lessening his figure, have but 
 served to make it loom larger, not only 011 the horizon of his 
 native land, but in lands beyond the sea. The fathers of your 
 college, with prophetic eye, evidenced their faith in Franklin 
 by giving for all time his name to the college they founded and 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 5 
 
 time has vindicated their judgment. It therefore seems fit 
 ting, on this one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary, that 
 one should choose for his theme a recall of the man. And in 
 another way Franklin is peculiarly connected with this Phi 
 Beta Kappa occasion, for no man was so much as he a living 
 embodiment of that helpful motto of our great society Philos- 
 ophia Biou Kubernetes Philosophy the Pilot of Life. 
 
 No man s life can be really known without a just estimate 
 of the influence upon it of those potent factors, heredity and 
 environment. As seed, soil and sunshine are to plant life, so 
 in human life we find in heredity the seed, and in environ 
 ment the soil and sunshine that determine the fruitage. It 
 was Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think, who said: " The educa 
 tion of a child begins two hundred and fifty years before it is 
 born." It follows, therefore, that he who takes the mere inci 
 dent of Franklin s New England birth as the keynote of his 
 life has omitted from his data the factors of a just estimate. 
 The truth is that Franklin was neither a Massachusetts nor a 
 Pennsylvania man. He was essentially a Briton, but a 
 Briton modified by colonial environment. In a letter ad 
 dressed to Lord Kames, in the early sixties, he himself says : 
 " No man can more sincerely rejoice than I do on the reduc 
 tion of Canada ; and this is not merely as I am a colonist but 
 as I am a Briton. I have long been of opinion that the founda 
 tions of the future grandeur and stability of the British Em 
 pire lie in America." 
 
 Josiah Franklin, the father of Benjamin, was an English 
 man, who emigrated to America at mature age and it is an 
 interesting fact to know that within a few miles of where 
 George Washington s ancestors lived in England the Frank 
 lins also dwelt. Here for generations, father and son, Frank 
 lin after Franklin, had been blacksmiths. Have you ever 
 thought what a seventeenth century roadside smith was in 
 England ? Let me tell you. He was the best posted man in 
 all his county as to what the other counties of England were 
 and what they were doing. Though his shop might be modest, 
 
6 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 his face begrimed and his book-learning scant, he was in the 
 forefront bench of the classes in the working university of life. 
 Travel in those days was not indulged in by many. It was 
 only the rare few who ever got outside their own neighbor 
 hood, but the comparatively few who did were the most pro 
 gressive men of England and to the smith s shop they all in 
 their journey came and had to come and the smith met them 
 there. The learned, the wealthy, the powerful, the adventur 
 ous; all who traveled from home had to come to the smith s 
 forge and as he fastened the loose shoes of their horses these 
 travelers left with the smith some of their news and views and 
 the smith in turn gave them his own. From them he gained 
 for his neighbors the news from the rest of England and in re 
 turn through these travelers he gave to the rest of England 
 the news of his own vicinage. He was the real genesis of the 
 mail, the newsletter, the telegraph, the newspaper of to-day, 
 for all these are but as the grimy smith then was, the world s 
 means of knowing what the rest of the world is doing. In the 
 democracy of his shop the smith learned to stand unabashed 
 before the great men with whom he was thrown in contact and 
 he gathered from them the lesson that when they came to his 
 shop he was the peer of the greatest, for his brain and hand 
 and skill were necessary to enable wealth and power, learning 
 and pleasure to journey onward. The smith s shop was a 
 kindergarten of democracy. But he was more than a mere 
 news purveyor, for in the smith s work we have the germ of 
 that quick, decisive initiative that is the keynote of the world s 
 modern progress. Other artisans, the weaver, the carpenter, 
 the stone cutter, the cobbler, might pause in their work to plan 
 and think out the next step, but the smith, when the iron was 
 hot, must, then instantly and then only, strike true and strike 
 hard. So, too, in that subtlest of work, the tempering of his 
 metals, he must think deeply and observe closely the effect of 
 the great laws of nature, the chilling, the tempering, and 
 treating of metal by the primary elements of heat and cold. 
 Sudden and slow chilling, the use of oils and water for tempers 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 7 
 
 and the many thermo-chemical problems that to-day puzzle 
 the brain of great metallurgists. It is no fanciful picture that 
 sees in this long line of thoughtful, sucessful, sturdy, English 
 blacksmiths, keenly alive to the events of the day, mixers alike 
 with the great and the lowly, students of nature s laws, prac 
 tical in the fruitage of their work, the prototype of the smith s 
 descendant. I It is no fancy to say that in this long and sturdy 
 line of Saxon Franklins that our own Benj amin was then being 
 fitted to be in touch with the common folk and to know their 
 lives and to stand unabashed before kings. It is no imagina 
 tion that he had a heritage that naturally led to a study of 
 the great laws of nature. No fancy that the forge of the Eng 
 lish roadside smith produced a colonial Franklin stove in uni 
 versal use, the best drawing chimney of his day, the man who, 
 when the time came to strike, did so and who drove his blows 
 quick and hard. Such was the heritage from his British fath 
 ers, of this man who, at fifty-four years of age, called himself, 
 as we have seen, a Briton, and who regarded America as the 
 seat of England s empire. 
 
 And what the heritage from his mother? She was the 
 daughter of Captain Peter Folger, another British emigrant. 
 From them Franklin inherited a blood of toleration that made 
 him intolerant of ISTew England s intolerance. Of Peter 
 Folger, Parton wrote : " He was one of the few early settlers 
 of Massachusetts who felt the iniquity of persecuting the 
 Baptists and Quakers for opinion s sake and he lifted his voice 
 against that vulgar heathenism. It was in the dark era of 
 1676 when Quakers and Baptists were still in peril of being 
 publicly whipped, branded and banished into the wilderness 
 that honest Peter Folger wrote his good doggerel poem, A 
 Looking Glass of the Times/ in which those outrages were 
 pronounced to be the sin of New England for which a just 
 God was visiting her with Indian Wars and massacres. Dr. 
 Franklin was proud to reckon among his progenitors a man 
 capable of thus rebuking his generation and he quoted some 
 of Peter Folger s roughest words with approbation." It was 
 
8 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 this inherited spirit of intolerance, this sacred right in sacred 
 things, of each man to think out for himself the great problem 
 of his relations to God that made Franklin begin to feel 
 he was out of place in New England. Indeed, we learn that 
 as a lad of seventeen he was " a little obnoxious to the growing 
 party " and that " his indiscreet disputations about religion " 
 had come to be " pointed out with horror by good people and 
 as infidel and atheist." Franklin s father meant him to be a 
 clergyman, writing, he had resolved to devote him " as a tithe 
 of his sons to the service of the church. 7 I speak in no disre 
 spectful words of this noble purpose, but one cannot refrain 
 from a sense of the incongruous when we picture Franklin 
 forcing his unorthodox breadth of view into the narrow spirit 
 ual horizon of an orthodox New England clergyman of that 
 day. Splendid as such a clergyman s work was in many ways, 
 it is clear that Franklin s mind and Franklin s soul would 
 have dwarfed and dwindled in the narrow localism of the 
 New England theocracy of that day. He was meant for hu 
 manity and not for New England and Providence led him away 
 from his birthplace to a life place that could better fit him for 
 that work. His restive spirit was out of sympathy with the 
 religious life around him. His inherited love of freedom of 
 thought for others claimed a like right of thought-freedom for 
 himself. The New England religious life in which he found 
 himself was essentially self-centered and the working out of 
 one s own salvation its keynote. And just as in a different 
 form the selfish, self-centered monanticism of an earlier age 
 had driven Luther to the broader altruism of looking out for 
 the future of others besides himself so it is just as clear that- 
 the broad visioned, free thinking, altruistic work of one like 
 Franklin, who afterwards said that, " the highest form of 
 worship is service to man," lay elsewhere than in his birth 
 place. Let us turn then from that birthplace, where to him 
 the times were out of joint, to the environment which wel 
 comed him as a footsore, friendless and hungry lad of seven 
 teen and in which after the world had showered its highest 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 9 
 
 honors upon him his body was laid to rest and remaineth unto 
 this day. 
 
 When young Franklin left Massachusetts I ask the candid 
 reader of history to tell me to what colony could he turn save 
 to those tolerant Quakers against whose persecution his sturdy 
 grandfather Folger had dared to raise a solitary voice of pro 
 test. The colony of William Penn was above all others in the 
 new world a place where freedom of thought and freedom of 
 speech were as free as free men could make them. In that col 
 ony there was actual liberty to worship God according to the 
 dictates of one s own conscience. That liberty and the con 
 science and the freedom were meant not only for the founders 
 race and church but equally for men of all other races and all 
 other churches. That colony was in unique contrast to each 
 and all of its sisters. Each of them had been substantially 
 the outgrowth of a single race and a single religion and it is 
 no reflection on any of those races or religions to say, what 
 every truthful historian recognizes, that where any race, and 
 especially where any one religion, has the power of monopoly, 
 it rarely, if ever, fails to exert it. In the seventy odd years 
 that had passed since American colonization had its begin 
 ning in the settlement at Jamestown, the Quakers had learned 
 the lesson in their experience both in European despotism and 
 American freedom, so-called, that all types of religion which 
 were dominant in those European countries and the American 
 colonies, however they differed in dogma or practice, united 
 in one common universal fact, that they were all solidly 
 united as members of a church militant when it came to 
 handling Quakers. The Quaker had suffered from persecu 
 tion by them all, but with a vastness of generosity and with a 
 liberality then unknown in the religious world, William Penn 
 caught the over-looked spirit of a Master s love that " beareth 
 all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things and endureth 
 all things," and opened up his colony without reservation to 
 all races and to all religions. " Come unto me all ye that labor 
 and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. 7 And so it came 
 
10 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 that when William Penn set foot on the banks of the Delaware, 
 he then and there for the first time dedicated and consecrated 
 to real freedom of thought American soil as it had never been 
 dedicated before. When the real history of the founders of 
 the American colonies shall be written it will be found that in 
 broadminded outlook, in the catholicity of humanity, in just 
 appreciation of the rights of all men, there was no founder on 
 the American coast to compare with William Penn. The 
 heart of humanity everywhere instantly responded to the gen 
 erous spirit of the Quaker s invitation. The English, the 
 Welsh, the Irish, the German, the Dutch, the Scotch all re 
 sponded as none of these races had ever done in the case of 
 any other colony. Whole communities of the old world were 
 depopulated to create replicas of the old mother land in the 
 several counties of Pennsylvania. And so it was not only in 
 races but in religions also. The church of Rome, the church of 
 England, the follower of Luther, the adherent of Calvin, the 
 Moravian, the Dunkard, men of all religions and men of no 
 religion, found for the first time under God s sky and on 
 American soil what real religious freedom actually was. It 
 is a noteworthy fact that no colony had up to that time at 
 tracted the mighty trecking of those two great strains of strong 
 blood, the German and the Scotch, a movement that made whole 
 sections of Pennsylvania, another Germany and Scotland, as 
 did this invitation of Penn. There could be no doubt that 
 such a colony, whose cornerstone was that freedom of thought 
 which other colonial builders had rejected, would foster intel 
 lectual growth and progress of every kind. In this colonial 
 atmosphere of tolerance, art, science, learning rooted and 
 ripened until Pennsylvania became the thought-leader among 
 the colonies. The intellectual as well as the topographical key 
 stone and cornerstone of the nation. Her medical schools were 
 the foremost in the colonies and attracted students from all 
 others. Indeed, the advance of medicine and its kindred 
 branch of chemistry can be shown by the fact that when one of 
 the oldest of New England colleges took the then novel step of 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. ^11 
 
 teaching chemistry it had to send Benjamin Silliman to Phila 
 delphia for a year s study, as the only place in America where 
 he could acquire such knowledge. And thus it came about 
 that the first hospital in America was established there and 
 Pennsylvania s metropolis and then capital assumed the novel 
 duty of cleaning the streets, a pioneer step in which we find 
 the beginning of that great field of municipal hygiene and 
 sanitation that to-day is the most serious duty of municipal 
 life, a step whose progressive influence has crossed the seas 
 to drive yellow fever from Havana and Manilla and made pos 
 sible the Panama Canal. Time permits me but to suggest to 
 your minds the many evidences of the progressive life of 
 colonial Pennsylvania that may be studied by anyone inter 
 ested in that subject. In our own profession the phrase, " a 
 Philadelphia lawyer," became proverbial all over the land 
 and a tolerant community is wont to produce great men in the 
 law and the broad atmosphere of freedom the Pennsylvania 
 lawyer imbibed is best shown by the fact that when that great 
 question of jury right arose in the neighboring colony of New 
 York where the judges who were then under the power of re 
 call by the king sought to control free speech by holding that 
 a crown-chosen judge but not the jury could pass on the libel 
 lous character of publications aimed at the sovereignty on 
 which the judge s tenure depended, it was to Pennsylvania the 
 lovers of liberty turned for help, and in response to that Mace 
 donian cry, our liberty taught colony sent from the atmosphere 
 of freedom Andrew Hamilton who in that case established the 
 great principle that a jury could pass on the character of the 
 libel. 
 
 In this stimulating field of Penn the apprentice boy found 
 kindred spirits and in it he ripened to early and rich fruitage. 
 His versatility was remarkable and in every sphere his suc 
 cess was as marked as it was rapid. In this broadened envir 
 onment he was constrained to broaden and in turn he helped 
 to broaden it. Coupled with a speculative mind was an in 
 tense common sense that led him by his industry, his thrift 
 
12 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 and his foresight to gather at a very early age a fortune for 
 those days, but when he had gathered it, with a breadth of 
 view that affords an envied model to many a man who has 
 made his whole life subservient to money getting, Franklin, 
 with a philosophic resolve to make money his servant instead 
 of his master, withdrew from active business life and gave 
 himself to his colony, his country and his fellow men. Hav 
 ing gained a living from his country, he turned to living for 
 that country. Through Poor Kichard s wise sayings, his alma 
 nac and other writings Franklin became the greatest human 
 teacher the world has probably ever known in the people s in 
 dustry, in leading them to hardheaded common sense in the 
 commonplace walks of everyday practical life. He was the 
 first American writer whose works were widely circulated 
 abroad. Indeed, in their time they were more widely read 
 than any book save the Bible. His scientific research covered 
 every field, electricity, ocean phenomena, medicine, chemistry, 
 heat and cold. His great mind seemed to grasp all spheres of 
 human knowledge. The other day I was surprised to find 
 that he was the first intelligent observer and writer about the 
 Gulf Stream and indeed that he actually gave the Gulf Stream 
 its name. I was equally amazed to read letters of his in which 
 he prophetically brought before the medical profession the 
 value of open air in the treatment of disease. Indeed, 
 the open air treatment of tuberculosis and many other prac 
 tical benefits are all clearly outlined in Franklin s writings. 
 That it has taken a great profession more than a century 
 to realize the truth of what the layman Franklin told them 
 in plain words shows the prophetic type of his great mind. 
 He lived not only in his own time but a century beyond it. 
 He was the father of modern electricity, and we who think 
 of him only as observing the phenomena of electricity 
 through his kite lose sight of the intensely practical nature 
 of the man. The lightning rod was his practical sugges 
 tion for protection from lightning and I find him speaking in 
 one of his letters of " An old religionist whom I had relieved 
 in a paralytic case by electricity, and who being afraid I 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 13 
 
 should grow proud upon it sent me his serious though rather 
 impertinent caution." The scientific study of heat and his 
 practical bent of mind led him to invent the widely used 
 Franklin stove and to devise a form of chimney that came 
 into general use, but in these as in the copywriting of his 
 books, Franklin refused to avail himself of any personal pro 
 tection or gain. His public life and private practice rang true 
 to his motto that " the highest form of worship is service to 
 man." He started the first public library in Philadelphia. 
 He was instrumental in founding in that city the academy 
 from which the University of Pennsylvania grew, just as 
 later he came to Lancaster and helped lay the cornerstone of 
 this college which bears his name. He organized the first anti- 
 slavery society in the world and as its president, and fittingly 
 in this colony of freedom where the Declaration of Independ 
 ence, the Constitution, and the flag had their birthplace, he 
 wrote and signed the first petition ever presented to Congress 
 for the abolition of slavery. Neither slavery of mind or 
 slavery of body found lodgment in Franklin s brain or heart. 
 During all this time he took an active part in public service. 
 He was not of that type of men who become public men be 
 cause they make themselves public. The simple fact was that 
 when anything of a public nature was to be done the public 
 demand was for Franklin s leadership, moderation, common 
 sense and ability. His leadership was not of the self-sought 
 or self-announced type. It was a leadership that came from 
 the conviction of the people that he was fitted and needed to 
 lead. {JLike Moses and Luther, like Washington and Lincoln, 
 like every great leader that is truly great, he distrusted his 
 ability to lead. His call came from the nation and not from 
 himself. He was one of the great founders of our mail serv 
 ice and his far-seeing mind caught the benefits of a wider ex 
 change of environment and social intercourse as a uniting 
 factor among the colonies. His swarthy forbear, the English 
 smith at the cross-roads, had engraven that in his nature. He 
 attended the meetings of delegates from other colonies and his 
 
14 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 wise counsels contributed greatly to furthering the common 
 interest in matters of common concern. He took strong 
 grounds on the uniting of the colonies for their protection on 
 the frontier in the French and Indian wars. In the Brad- 
 dock campaign his services were invaluable in the practical 
 and vital point of securing wagon trains through his influence 
 with the Pennsylvania farmers. His interest in that cam 
 paign, and the same remark may be made of Washington, 
 showed that these two great far-seeing minds, representing as 
 they did the two great far-seeing commonwealths of Virginia 
 and Pennsylvania behind them the two commonwealths that 
 won the gateway to the west and in the gaining of the west 
 laid the real foundation of American extension Franklin 
 and Washington both realized as few men did that the great 
 future of America lay in the Mississippi Basin. In a pro 
 phetic letter to Lord Kames, which I have referred to before 
 in speaking of the taking of that country and Canada from 
 the French, Franklin said : "I am therefore by no means for 
 restoring Canada. If we keep it all the country from the St. 
 Lawrence to the Mississippi will in another century ~be filled 
 with British people. Britain itself will become vastly more 
 populous by the immense increase of its commerce. The At 
 lantic sea will be covered with her trading vessels and your 
 naval power thence continually increasing will extend your 
 influence around the whole world." At a later day and in the 
 midst of the Revolution, when the American Congress by a 
 vote to which there were only three recorded votes in the nega 
 tive advised that John Jay agree to a treaty with Spain by 
 which the mouth of the Mississippi should be forever closed 
 as a free gateway to the sea, Franklin summed up the contro 
 versy in a nut shell of homely common sense " Poor as we 
 are, yet as I know we shall be rich, I would rather agree with 
 them to buy at a great price the whole of their (Spain s) right 
 on the Mississippi, than sell a drop of its waters. A neighbor 
 might as well ask me to sell my street door." In truth, his 
 mind, reaching so far into the future, had so grasped the 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 15 
 
 possibilities of the west, and he had become so imbued through 
 Braddock s mistakes of Britain s inability to effect its win 
 ning, that he became convinced the colonies must win it them 
 selves. We accordingly find that his first public mission 
 abroad was to England in 1757 and its purpose was to secure 
 the taxation of Penn s proprietary lands in order to give Penn 
 sylvania the means to carry on the French and Indian War. 
 From this time on Franklin spent the greater part of his time 
 in Europe and away from his family. It was a sacrifice of 
 private life to public duty, and at the close of his life Frank 
 lin said, as many another man can who has given himself 
 to public service, " They engrossed the prime of my life, they 
 have eaten my flesh and seem resolved now to pick my bones." 
 From 1762 to 1767 he lived continuously in England trying 
 to secure a repeal of laws that were obnoxious to the colonies 
 and later his duty forced him to spend from 1776 to 1785 
 in France, where he succeeded in effecting an alliance with 
 that country whereby he obtained the French troops and the 
 French money that, coupled with the financing of Morris, 
 enabled Washington to fight the Kevolution. After Washing 
 ton and Rochambeau had compelled the surrender of Corn- 
 wallis, Franklin remained two years in Paris and largely as 
 the result of his work the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, 
 which was the verdict and judgment of the Revolution. By 
 it Franklin secured not only the independence of the thirteen 
 colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, but he gained what was 
 equally important, a surrender from England of the Missis 
 sippi Basin as far west as the Father of Waters a diplo 
 matic territorial victory on which, through the gain of the 
 Mississippi Valley, the future greatness of the American na 
 tion then depended and now rests. 
 
 This hurried sketch gives us the principal facts in Frank 
 lin s life and from it we pass to a necessarily brief considera 
 tion of the effect of these things on the make-up of the man. 
 His life naturally divides itself into three periods: first, the 
 pre-Revolutionary, or formative one; second, the Revolution- 
 
16 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 ary, or effective period; and third, the post-Revolutionary, or 
 reflective period. 
 
 Turning first to the prexRevolutionary period of Franklin s 
 life what strikes one especially is Franklin s essentially Brit 
 ish make-up at that time. A Briton, but a Briton modified 
 by colonial environment. He was, as we noted above, the 
 prototype of that great army of British colonists who, under 
 a wiser motherhood than Britain gave to Franklin, are to-day 
 making Canada, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India 
 what they are, and who in turn in the reflex of colonial spirit 
 are doing so much to mould and make England herself; for 
 the English colonies are in truth to-day wielding a greater 
 influence on England than she is on them. For mark you, the 
 great tide of English emigration to her colonies is to-day as 
 then but the race acknowledgment that in the problems of 
 life s betterment and opportunity, the colony gives more prom 
 ise of the answer to ideals than does the motherland. This 
 same relation, that of a colonist convinced that the land for 
 him was the colony, but recognizing still his devotion to the 
 motherland and reverence for her institutions, was Franklin s 
 state of mind during the pre-Revolutionary period. But the 
 England of that day had not yet learned the lesson she had to 
 learn later through the loss of her oldest colonial child. To 
 Franklin, the loyal British colonist, came the quiet, unrecog 
 nized but insistent call of his new world country for self gov 
 ernment. Had England heeded that call from men like Frank 
 lin and Washington, had it even given an answering echo to 
 their calls, the colonial agitators of that day might have agi 
 tated in vain and separation from England been postponed 
 for a generation. The Franklins, the Washingtons and the 
 Marshalls might have died loyal colonists and the work of the 
 Revolution been left to the Websters, the Jacksons and the 
 Calhouns of the next generation. But destiny had filled its 
 time. A headstrong ruler, a foolish cabinet, a failure of the 
 old world to recognize the signs of the times in the new, drove 
 with the irresistible logic of events the British colonist Frank- 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 17 
 
 lin out of his pre-Revolutionary period into becoming a na 
 tion founder in the next. The stern logic of events was driv 
 ing Franklin for he came to separation slowly and unwill 
 ingly from his birthright as a British colonial, and he was 
 forced to become the first great American whom the new world 
 gave to the old. For the truth is that Franklin was meant for 
 the universe. In the economy of humanity he belonged to the 
 world and to humanity in its fullest and freest expression. 
 It has well been said: "Benjamin Franklin was the first 
 American born on this side of the water who was meant for 
 the universe. His mere existence was a sort of omen. It was 
 impossible to suppose that a people who could produce a man 
 of that scope and intellect could long remain in a condition of 
 political dependence. It would have been preposterous to have 
 had Franklin die a colonist and go down to posterity, not as 
 an American, but as a colonial Englishman. He was a 
 microcosm of the coming nation of the United States." And 
 so, by the silent march of the nation, which only the thought 
 ful see, and for which only the thoughtful prepare, the great 
 onward march of events carried Franklin out of the colonial 
 pre-Revolutionary stage of his life into the era of his middle 
 life, the Revolutionary or effective period. And how effective ? 
 He is the only American whose name is signed to those three 
 great instruments, the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty 
 of Paris and the Constitution. By the first he helped save 
 democracy from autocracy. By the second he helped make the 
 title of democracy to democracy more absolute. By the third 
 he sought to save democracy from itself. 
 
 The three men who, to my mind, were the bed-rock creators 
 of American independence were George Washington, Benja 
 min Franklin, who, as noted, laid the corner-stone of this col 
 lege, and Robert Morris, who was one of its first board of 
 trustees. Without the work of each of these three men in their 
 several spheres, no one of the others could have made inde 
 pendence a reality. Washington at the head of the army; 
 Morris repleting the scant war-chest on which the army lived ; 
 30 
 
18 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 and Franklin bringing hands across the sea in French alliance, 
 French gold and French armies these were the fighting and 
 sustaining factors on which independence was secured. The 
 Adamses, the Patrick Henrys, the John Hancocks, with their 
 courageous agitation, were the men who made America inde 
 pendent on paper; but Morris, Franklin and Washington were 
 men who made the independence on paper independence in 
 fact. It was all well enough to refer to the imaginary " three 
 millions of people armed in the holy cause of liberty," but 
 this phrase was but a sounding brass and timbling cymbal. 
 The scant three thousand who shivered around the huts up 
 yonder on the Pennsylvania hills of Valley Forge knew the 
 three millions armed in the holy cause only netted about three 
 thousand, and Franklin felt it necessary to get the places of 
 some of the three million supplied by Eochambeau and his 
 thousands of Frenchmen, who later shared with Washington 
 the glory and credit of the actual results at Yorktown. The 
 herculean efforts of Morris were required to feed and clothe 
 an army with money that was so worthless that to-day we un 
 consciously revere his unrequited services when we speak of a 
 thing as not worth a continental. But these three, Washing 
 ton at the camp fire; Franklin at the council table; and 
 Morris at the war chest made up that on which all wars are 
 successfully waged, courageous fighting, wise financing and 
 diplomatic diplomacy, and the connection of two of these great 
 men with this college makes a reference to their great service 
 timely. And in that connection I cannot forbear saying that 
 I trust the day will come when in front of Independence 
 Square, and on the side of Washington s statue, will be placed 
 a fitting recognition of Robert Morris, who so loyally and un 
 selfishly strove to make Washington s work possible. 
 
 In the post-Revolutionary era of Franklin s life came his 
 supreme work in helping to make the Constitution. He had 
 signed the Declaration of Independence, which had called self- 
 government into existence. He had signed the Treaty of 
 Paris which gave self-government a place of habitation and he 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 19 
 
 had signed the Constitution, which he and those who labored 
 with him thought was the best way of insuring that self gov 
 ernment should not perish from the earth. 
 
 The world s history is a series of the swings of the pendulum 
 to different fields of thought. Between the limits of those 
 swings in the pendulum s path lie those ranges that mark a 
 nation s changed view point. One hundred and twenty-five 
 years ago Washington and Franklin and the fathers who had 
 freed themselves from monarchical government control found 
 themselves confronted by the problem of creating a new form 
 of government. They went about it slowly, deliberately, 
 thoughtfully, and as you will see from Franklin s life, prayer 
 fully. They realized that there were some inherent weaknesses 
 in a pure democracy that had in the end destroyed Greece and 
 Rome. For these reasons they distrusted the principle of an 
 entire nation governing itself without representatives. On the 
 other hand, they saw the inherent weakness of monarchy was 
 the arbitrary and selfish government of an absolute ruler like 
 George III. To avoid these two extremes they determined to 
 form a constitution and make it their chart. The significance of 
 the constitution as the real foundation of the new country 
 was at once recognized and liberty loving people everywhere 
 felt that a new era had come into the field of national govern 
 ment in a constitutional government. That constitution has 
 proved the model from which liberty loving peoples every 
 where have drawn inspiration and forms of government. 
 When the South American republics were to be builded ; when 
 South Africa was to be federalized it was to the constitution 
 of the United States both countries turned for a model. Its 
 principles are interwoven in the systems of the great English 
 colonies and in its struggles for what are best for government 
 in the new world, China, the oldest nation of the old world, 
 reached out and found guidance in the chart that Franklin 
 had helped draw and Lincoln helped save. And we have to 
 day the novel situation that when, after one hundred and 
 twenty-five years of trial of constitutional government, some 
 
20 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 of our people are becoming distrustful of it, the oldest and 
 wisest nation of all, to wit, the Chinese, after trying every 
 thing else for some four thousand years, has come to the con 
 clusion our Constitution is the best form and they are model 
 ling from it. It remains for time to determine whether the Amer 
 ican experience of a century, or the Chinese of forty, shall 
 prove the wiser. During the century and more that followed 
 the making of the Constitution our country has grown great 
 under it. It has proven the one thing around which the men 
 of the north rallied to save the Union and recalling that con 
 stitution the men of the south were content to come back into 
 the Union, feeling that was the one thing above all others to 
 protect them after their return, for the south had but to recall 
 Lincoln s assurance to them in his first inaugural that " all the 
 vital rights of minorities and of individuals are assured to 
 them by affirmations and negations, guaranties and prohibi 
 tions in the Constitution." For a century the pendulum of 
 constitutional regard swung to the limit of reverence for that 
 sublime document which had made and preserved us a nation. 
 It had proved itself to be the holy writ of self-government and 
 it had proved so because it based self-government on govern 
 ment of self. But we have come upon a time when the pendu 
 lum has swung to the other side. The popular thought to-day 
 seems to be that constitutions are hindrances instead of helps 
 to government, that instead of securing liberty they are deny 
 ing it. But in spite of these changes in constitutional regard, 
 let us remember, my friends, that though the pendulum 
 swings the old clock does not. The figures on its face still bear 
 true witness to the unchanging law of time. And as there are 
 certain truths in science that no change of opinion can alter, 
 so there are certain elements in human nature and govern 
 ment is simply human nature applied on a large scale which 
 are unchangeably fixed. And of all unchanging things the 
 most changeless thing in human nature is self. And self and 
 its selfishness are only aggravated when the selfishness of indi 
 viduals becomes the accumulated force of the selfishness of a 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 21 
 
 nation. Let us stop for a moment and ask ourselves what is 
 true self-government by a people. It is not alone the right of 
 a people to be self-governed, but it is the duty also of a people 
 to govern itself, for true self-government is after all govern 
 ment of self by self. The self must not only govern but it must 
 be willing to be governed, and this being so it follows that 
 true self-government by a nation is nothing more and nothing 
 less than the principle of self-government in the individual 
 life collectively applied to self-government by a nation. Do I 
 make that clear ? Let me illustrate. , The proof of a really 
 great man s strength of character is his willingness and abil 
 ity to protect himself against his own selfishness. To do this 
 the greater and stronger a man is, the more carefully and 
 thoroughly does he place limits on himself and lay down for 
 his own conduct in life certain limitations, physical, moral 
 and mental. These self-imposed limitations are the Rubicons 
 across which he can only go at the sacrifice of his real man 
 hood. Now our fathers knew how they as colonists had suf 
 fered from the rulers bound by no constitutional limitations. 
 They knew from painful experience that the power to exer 
 cise power will breed abuse of power, unless in some way re 
 strained. They knew that men in the aggregate would in form 
 ing a nation at times become just as selfish and unjust as the 
 unlimited individual monarch would become. They realized 
 that selfishness was so deep-grained in all men that unless 
 limited it would show itself in men collectively as well as 
 singly. That this was true in a single man who was called a 
 king or in a collection of men, who were all rulers or kings, 
 which was a pure democracy. And recognizing this danger 
 in a single man, which they had seen in England, and knowing 
 it existed in collections of men, which they had seen in the 
 downfall of Greece and Rome, they reasoned thus: We are 
 considering the experiment of a nation being its own ruler 
 and to do so we must arrange for a ruler of some kind. So 
 while in reality and truth this is a government of the whole 
 people, yet as all men comprising the whole people will cot 
 
22 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 likely agree on all things, we will establish the principle of a 
 majority rule, namely, we will agree that for the time being 
 a majority shall be the ruler of the nation; but inasmuch as 
 the minority, who are not the rulers of the nation, must be 
 protected, for they are a part of the people, and inasmuch as 
 those who are in the majority may in time grow selfish and do 
 wrong to the helpless minority, we will, following that reason 
 able course which commends itself to us as individuals, pro 
 tect our minority selves from our self-governing majority by 
 this constitutional chart, which so long as we continue it shall 
 bind and limit that majority of ourselves so that it cannot 
 wrong the minority of ourselves. They said that if England 
 had had a constitution and King George had been limited 
 thereby he would not have done those things which in our 
 declaration we charge him with doing and which caused this 
 revolution, viz., violation of our rights of person and property ; 
 taxation without representation; and to quote other words of 
 the Declaration of Independence, and which it will surprise 
 many of us to know was one of the causes of the Revolution, 
 namely, that the judges of that day were subject to the recall 
 of the king or to use the words of our Declaration, King 
 George would not have " made judges dependent on his will 
 alone for the tenure of their office." When, then, our fathers 
 proposed by a constitution to put certain limitations upon 
 themselves were they unpatriotic and undemocratic ? When 
 Franklin and those with him who had won freedom through 
 much tribulation and with a hangman s rope around their 
 necks if they failed, were they despising that freedom, when 
 as free men they in effect said We are now so free that we 
 can afford to surrender some of our freedom for the common 
 good. Is a stream restrained of its freedom if in its course a 
 dam be built and its confined waters made to serve some use 
 ful purpose? Is a man who fences his field any the less en 
 joying his own because the fence which keeps his neighbor s 
 cattle out also keeps his own within proper bounds? Were 
 these wise men like Franklin not applying to their govern- 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 23 
 
 ment what you and I, if we are following Franklin s example, 
 are doing every day in our own lives ? Are you doing to-day 
 whatever you have power to do ? or are you voluntarily placing 
 upon yourself limitations and restrictions which you observe 
 in all your intercourse with your fellows? The old truth is 
 equally true of men and of nations, that no man liveth unto 
 himself and no nation, or the majority of no nation, lives of 
 and for itself alone. This civilization of ours, the business 
 life of a community, the happiness of family life all would 
 drift into unworkable confusion if each of us did not volun 
 tarily place upon himself limitations which we will not pass 
 although we have the power to pass them. And if this deep 
 ingrained principle of self-imposed limitation is the true safe 
 guard of individual life when and at what point, tell me, can 
 that principle be safely abandoned when self-controlled indi 
 viduals unite themselves in a self -controlled government? If 
 for any one man to revoke and recall the self-imposed limita 
 tions of his own life is to undermine the foundation stones of 
 his individual character, when does the undermining process 
 of the character of the nation disappear when a hundred mil 
 lions of people, associated in the form of government, revoke 
 and recall their self-imposed national limitations? No, no; 
 the safety of the individual man lies in a self-controlled indi 
 vidualism, no more and no less than the safety of a self-gov 
 erning people rests on constitutionally established self-control. 
 And in so holding we make no fetish of constitutions. They 
 are not laws of the Medes and Persians for which there is no 
 change, for a constitution wisely makes provision for its own 
 change, but mark you, in a constitutional way. This consti 
 tutional power of constitutional change has been and always 
 will be exercised. The closed door of our federal constitution 
 has already opened fifteen times to welcome fifteen different 
 amendments during its history. The state of Pennsylvania 
 has had four different constitutions since the colonial times. 
 The great state of Ohio is now changing hers, and already 
 possessing this salutary power of change and amendment when 
 
24 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 changed conditions demand them, and provided with a method 
 of change that involves deliberation, argument, patience and 
 forbearance, can we regard as necessary any other method of 
 constitutional change ? Indeed, my friends, I cannot help but 
 feel we are all getting unduly stirred up, if not a trifle hyster 
 ical on this question of constitutional restriction as applied to 
 the question of the constitutionality of laws. An impression 
 has been fostered that every helpful law in some way runs the 
 risk of being declared unconstitutional. The mischiefs in 
 that respect are not as bad as we imagine. To illustrate I ven 
 ture the thought that the United States to-day is the most law- 
 burdened nation on the globe. As soon as a man is elected to 
 a legislative body, he feels it his solemn duty to propose and 
 have some new laws passed. I presume there are in force in 
 the forty-odd states of the union to-day more than 150,000 
 laws. That means an average of about 3,000 to each state, 
 with the Acts of Congress not included. This estimate is 
 moderate, for I find that in the state of Pennsylvania alone 
 the legislature of last year added 466 laws to the ones we 
 already had. These 150,000 laws stand on our statute books 
 to-day as enforcible constitutional measures, more in number, 
 I venture to suggest, than the laws of all Europe combined, 
 and when some one is complaining to us about constitutions 
 and their injustice in thwarting legislation, let us ask that 
 person to tell us how many of the 150,000 laws have been held 
 unconstitutional, and if he knows anything about the facts he 
 will find the percentage of acts stricken down as unconstitu 
 tional on the far side of the decimal point. You will pardon 
 me for injecting this personal testimony, but I presume it is a 
 fair example of the practical experience of many brother 
 judges. In the twenty years of my judicial life the consti 
 tutionality of many laws, state and federal, has been raised 
 before me, but I have never once enjoyed that pleasure which 
 courts are popularly supposed to glory in, namely, of holding 
 a law was unconstitutional. It is true, that here and there in 
 the thousands of courts and judges our country has. there have 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 25 
 
 been and there will be unwise, mistaken decisions, and such 
 will continue to be the case so long as to err is human. It is 
 possible that the changed economical, commercial and social 
 conditions of modern life have not been duly appreciated by 
 all judges and that there are men on the bench to-day whose 
 mental vision is not of the breadth that we would desire it, 
 but it is equally true that there are only the same differences 
 of temperament and viewpoint on the bench that there are 
 among physicians and clergymen and all branches of pro 
 fessional men. But in all these professions, the mistakes that 
 are made, the faults of physicians and clergymen, and teach 
 ers and judges, will be found to be more often the fault of the 
 particular man who applies, or thinks he applies, the law, the 
 gospel, the text-book, the medicine, rather than the fault of the 
 law, the gospel, or the medical systems themselves. Mistakes 
 in regard to the constitution ! Why a man s own constitution 
 is a settled thing, but whether that man s constitution shall 
 have the breath of life breathed into it by one physician, who 
 will save the man s life, or whether that constitution will go 
 to the grave under another physician, is not a purely consti 
 tutional question, but its solution depends on the wisdom of 
 the man in selecting his own physician who is to handle his 
 constitution. But because some physicians have not been skil 
 ful and some judges have not been wise, in dealing with con 
 stitutions, let us not permit the unskilfulness of the one or the 
 unwisdom of the other to unwisely lead us to give up our con 
 stitutions, physical or governmental, entirely, or to overlook 
 the fact that the vast majority of doctors heal and the vast 
 majority of judges help men to the enjoyment and security 
 of life, liberty and happiness. And just as there are men 
 called to the ministry who have been called in a whisper, we 
 will find men in judicial work who have been called to that 
 work in an equally low voice, and I venture the thought that 
 if the care in the original call were greater and more pro 
 nounced, the less we would hear of the necessity of subsequent 
 recall, for after all, the belated recall is but a confession of the 
 
26 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 earlier mistake in the call. And this leads me to a word of 
 cheerful optimism to you college men who are entering on life. 
 Take with you the cheery spirit of cheery optimism that will re 
 fuse to be led into gloomy pessimism by the wrong-doing of the 
 few. Remember, my dear young friends, that the great mass of 
 your fellow men and fellow women are as honest and as square 
 as you, and if you stand and act on that platform you can rest 
 assured your neighbors are about as good as you. When old 
 Elijah s pessimistic eyes were opened he found there were 
 many thousand of his unsuspected countrymen whose knees 
 were as stiff as his when it came to bowing to Baal. And just 
 remember too that just as these seven thousand had probably 
 said nothing about their virtue because Elijah had not heard 
 of them, so now there is a reserve force of unheralded virtue 
 and righteousness in this country of yours that you never sus 
 pect until it vents itself in acts. That unwritten law. unpub 
 lished in statutes, but graven on the hearts of American men, 
 "women and children first," gave this country in the case of 
 the " Titanic," an insight into the unheralded moral qualities 
 of our people that, like deep rivers, flow quiet and strong 
 through the nation s life. No, no ; we must not conclude that 
 everything is going to the bad because a few individual men 
 and women do so and their shortcomings are heralded all over 
 the land. I often think as I read of the wrongdoing here and 
 there all over the country with which the columns of our 
 papers are largely taken up of what an infinitesimal part of 
 the nation s life they evidence. For one cashier who violates 
 his trust and becomes a defaulter I can point you to thousands 
 of cashiers over the country who to-day command the respect 
 and esteem of their fellow men and are more faithfully 
 watching and safeguarding funds of others than they are their 
 own. For one woman who has strayed from the path of virtue 
 and whose sin fills the morbid columns of papers devoted to 
 that side of life in some scandalous divorce proceeding I can, 
 thank God, point you to millions of homes in this country 
 where quiet women are true to the teachings of childhood, to 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 27 
 
 the loyalty to husband, to the motherhood of the family. For one 
 poor fellow in a gray suit who had yielded to temptation and pil 
 fered your mail and whose derelictions have been made the sub 
 ject of a sensational article I can point you to thousands upon 
 thousands of his fellow carriers who, in every city and hamlet in 
 this country, are incessantly doing their daily, unheralded, 
 unpublished duty. For one exceptional case that is delayed 
 in our courts, for one suit where, through the stern require 
 ments of the law, the miscarriage of a jury, or the lack of 
 knowledge of the judge, an injustice has been done and widely 
 commented upon with a view to undermining the confidence 
 in the administration of justice I can point out to you thou 
 sands upon thousands of cases where law, jury arid judge have 
 worked even and exact justice, no account of which ever enters 
 into the story you read in the public print, and for one man 
 on the bench whose actions have been such as to call forth 
 public criticism I can point to, from one end of this land to 
 the other, thousands and thousands of just judges whose lives 
 have been as pure and just as they have been quiet and un 
 heralded in the public print. The truth is that only the ex 
 ceptional, only the abnormal ever finds the light of publicity. 
 Error, sin, wrong-doing are what interest us, and we pay no 
 attention to the quiet routine and daily duty faithfully per 
 formed. I have often felt that if a paper and magazine ig 
 nored the mistakes of men and simply recorded the quiet doing 
 of duty in life it could not exist for no one would care to 
 read it. So my young college friends, in summing up the true 
 significance of the sensationalism of the day, do not in your 
 enthusiasm overlook the overwhelming mass of virtue, up 
 rightness, integrity, in the life and work of the uncounted 
 majority of our own people. The truth is that the great mass 
 of people want to do right and that those who deliberately 
 do wrong, either in public or private affairs, are in a small 
 minority. And in all these matters the great need of recall 
 is for us each one of us to recall ourselves to the higher 
 plane of life and to remember that the streets of Damascus 
 
28 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 were kept clean because every man in Damascus cleaned the 
 street in front of his own home. 
 
 But to recall myself to the subject in hand full of years, 
 honored as no man has ever been honored before by the world 
 in such varied fields, recognized as a man universally wise, 
 touching the varied fields of literature, statesmanship, science, 
 education and practically every phase of human life, Frank 
 lin came through it all the same modest, simple minded, great 
 man he had been all his life. With a head as clear as a sage s 
 he retained a heart as simple as a child s. A man of strong 
 views himself, one who would naturally call forth strong oppo 
 sition to his views, he had no personal enemies in public or 
 private life. He possessed that wonderful poise of fairness 
 and justice that lifted him out of the plane of personal antag 
 onism. In writing John Jay he said : " I have, as you observe, 
 some enemies in England, but they are my enemies as an 
 American. I have also two or three in America, who are my 
 enemies as a minister, but I thank God there are not in the 
 whole world any who are my enemies as a man, for by His 
 grace through a long life I have been enabled so to conduct 
 myself that there does not exist a human being who can justly 
 say Ben Franklin has wronged me. He had that wonder 
 ful faculty which Lincoln possessed of always stating his ad 
 versary s case so fairly and his own so strongly that any sense 
 of personal antagonism disappeared in the atmosphere of his 
 earnest effort to reach the truth. Like Lincoln, too, he had 
 that keen sense of humor which both used with kindness of 
 heart, but with merciless logic, to illustrate and puncture the 
 false reasoning of those opposed to them. Indeed, it is said 
 that to Franklin, instead of Jefferson, would have been en 
 trusted the writing of the Declaration of Independence but 
 his colleagues feared he would inject some of his humor 
 into it. 
 
 There is another thought in connection with the forming 
 of that constitution that we do well to bear in mind in connec 
 tion with Franklin. In these present days when men seem to 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 29 
 
 be groping for new things in government, when the self-suffi 
 ciency of each man essays to solve every governmental ques 
 tion from the standpoint of individual selfishness and to dog 
 matically put forward his views as the only views, it does us 
 all good to recall that splendid picture of the venerable and 
 beloved Franklin then over eighty years of age, rising in his 
 place in the convention that was then forming the Constitu 
 tion. In convincing words he told his colleagues that for 
 weeks they had been unable to agree on anything; that they 
 had been blindly groping about examining all forms of gov 
 ernment and liking none. In convincing words he reminded 
 them that in the beginning of their struggle with Britain that 
 they had had daily prayers in that room for divine protection ; 
 that their prayers had been answered and he added : " All of 
 us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed fre 
 quent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor." 
 And then turning to them, this great man, against whom the 
 cry of irreligious was often raised, said : " And have we now 
 forgotten that powerful friend? Or do we imagine we no 
 longer need his assistance? I have lived, sir, a long time; 
 and the longer I live the more convincing proof I see of this 
 truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And, if a 
 sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it 
 probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have 
 been assured, sir, in the sacred writing, that, Except the Lord 
 build the house they labor in vain that built it. I firmly be 
 lieve this and I also believe that without his concurring aid, 
 we shall succeed in this political building no better than the 
 builders of Babel." In the history of government building I 
 know no picture so sublime, no words so eloquent, as those in 
 which the wisest man of his day and generation moved the 
 makers of the Constitution to implore God s wisdom and guid 
 ance before all other business at the opening of each day s 
 work, unless it be those great words of Lincoln, as on that 
 February morning, when he left his Springfield neighbors on 
 his mission to prayerfully save the Constitution which Frank- 
 
30 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 lin had prayerfully founded : "I now leave you not knowing 
 when or whether ever I may return, with a task upon me 
 greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without 
 the assistance of that divine being who ever attended him I 
 cannot succeed; with that assistance I cannot fail." As we 
 look hack on these men, who made and saved our Constitution, 
 Washington on his knees in the thickets of Valley Forge, 
 Franklin moving for daily prayers in Independence Hall and 
 Lincoln invoking the guidance of Washington s God, may not 
 the thoughtful, prayerful hearts of the nation voice the peti 
 tion that every hand that seeks to change a constitution made 
 under God s guidance will as reverently seek that same guid 
 ance in changing " what God hath wrought." 
 
 And there is another great principle for which Franklin 
 and the men of his day contended, which I think can well be 
 made the subject of a thoughtful recall. That was the prin 
 ciple of representative government. "No purer or more de 
 voted friend of the people has ever lived in American history 
 than Benjamin Franklin. ~No man was closer to his fellow 
 men than he. His democracy was unquestioned and he re 
 tained his simplicity, his humanity and his neighborliness 
 wherever he was. But with all these there was no man who 
 believed more firmly in a representative system of govern 
 ment than he. Let us think who it was that gave us our inde 
 pendence, our Constitution, our country. There were three 
 millions of people in the United States in those days, but the 
 great mass of them were too busy, too much engrossed in their 
 own affairs to join in the winning of a new world from Eng 
 land, and of creating a new government. We are accustomed 
 to think of our whole people of that day as taking part in the 
 Revolution. Such was not the case. Those three million of 
 people were wise enough in their day and generation to stick 
 to the representative principle and that representation was 
 confined to such small numbers that it finally dwindled to a 
 representative Continental Congress and to George Wash 
 ington and the few thousand men at Valley Forge. It was in 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 31 
 
 the latter representative body on those bleak hills, that Wash 
 ington in the bitterness of his soul learned that the government 
 must be created on the representative principle and that John 
 Marshall, who came to Valley Forge a Virginian and left it 
 an American, learned those great principles of a representa 
 tive government that gave the Constitution vitality, a vitality 
 that has been based on one hundred years of use of the repre 
 sentative system. We do well to recall that it was men who 
 believed in a representative form of government who gave us 
 our country, who gave us our Constitution, who saved our 
 country from disunion through the Constitution, and who have 
 made this country under the Constitution a mighty people. 
 Let us remember that the government "of the people, by the 
 people and for the people" for which Lincoln pled was the 
 constitutional government "four score and seven years ago 
 our fathers brought forth upon this continent." And let those 
 who would change the representative form of our government 
 take heed to the warning Webster gave at the laying of the 
 corner stone of the monument on Bunker Hill: "We are 
 placed at the head of the system of representative and popular 
 government. If in our case the representative system ulti 
 mately fail, popular government must be pronounced impos 
 sible." The principle of the representative system is not 
 based on aristocracy or on a governing class, but on the simple, 
 sound, common sense- principle that the people select repre 
 sentatives in directors who in turn select school teachers to 
 teach their children; synods and conventions and representa 
 tive men or bodies, who in turn elect and ordain clergymen to 
 instruct them in matters religious; schools, examining boards 
 and other representative bodies, who shall qualify physicians 
 for medicine, plumbers for plumbing, lawyers for law, and so 
 on throughout all the occupations of life. It is the principle 
 on which every church is run to-day by selecting vestries, 
 elders, deacons and other bodies who, in a representative ca 
 pacity, select other representatives to do the work of the con 
 gregation. It is the principle in every bank by which the 
 
32 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 stockholders select directors, who in turn select president, 
 cashier and those who do its executive work. This Constitu 
 tion of ours was based on the theory of a wise use in certain 
 ways of the direct power of the people and a wise use in others 
 of the judgment and discretion of representative officials to 
 carry out portions of the work. They believed that the repre 
 sentative system fixed responsibility on those chosen and that 
 the obligation of responsibility was created, fostered and 
 stimulated by making men their representatives. They ob 
 served in their own every day life that indifferently good men 
 were turned into strong men by having the responsibility of 
 fatherhood put upon them. They said that a man who was 
 put to do a job was more likely to find some wa^ of doing it 
 than a man who was simply saying how it ought to be done 
 but without doing it. They believed that what was left as 
 anybody s business generally ended up in being nobody s duty. 
 In fact, they believed that government was like everything 
 else it would not work itself, and that either all the people 
 had to do all the work or else they had to select some repre 
 sentatives to do it for them. They felt that the true principle 
 was to select representatives and then sternly look to them for 
 results. And wherever all the people have acted on this whole 
 some principle, not the mere selection of representatives, but 
 the stern holding by the people of the people s representatives 
 responsible for results, representative government had been 
 and will be a government of the people. The success of gov 
 ernment depends not on the wiping out of representatives, but 
 in that vigilant interest of the people in seeing the people s 
 representatives do their duty. And if the interest of the 
 people is so lax that it will not compel its representatives to do 
 their duty, will that lax interest be effective enough to see that 
 any other form of government is effective ? Eternal vigilance 
 is not only the price of liberty, but the price of liberty s gov 
 ernment by the people. It seems to me that when we are ready 
 to eliminate representatives in other lines of work, the clergy 
 in morals, the physician in medicine, the teacher in learning 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 33 
 
 then and not until then are we ready to give up the repre 
 sentative principle in government. We are departing from 
 these principles to-day. Going away from what Franklin and 
 the fathers thought was wise, into the untried fields of direct 
 voting, direct primaries, direct work of every kind by the 
 people. Are we sure where we shall end by these changes ? I 
 recall very well the man who was a by-word in my boyhood- 
 all of whose troubles came through a new fender he bought for 
 his home. It is a homely story but it carries a lesson. Etwas 
 bought this fender, but when he placed it in front of his fire 
 place the mantel did not seem right, and so the mantel was 
 changed and that brought a change in the wainscoting and the 
 change in that room went into the hall and finally the whole 
 house had to be changed and Etwas s house ended up in a 
 sheriff s sale. We are tinkering with these changes and one 
 change is the father of unexpected other changes. I think 
 there is nothing that has happened in our national life that has 
 so distressed the minds of thoughtful Americans as the per 
 sonal conflict into which our only two living holders of our 
 highest office have been drawn during the last few months. 
 The partisans of each have blamed the other for this unhappy 
 occurrence. Has it ever occurred to you that neither of the 
 two men can be justly charged with what we have already re 
 corded ? Has it occurred to you that no other president has 
 been placed in this position and that the placing of these two 
 men in it has been the result of the changes that are taking 
 place in our constitutional form of government? When the 
 people require that the principles of the old representative 
 system of presidential nominations shall be done away with 
 a system by the way that in a hundred years gave us no 
 president of whom the nation was ashamed and that the men 
 seeking the high office of president of the United States shall 
 be forced on the hustings by the presidential primary, do we 
 need any more signal and striking example of the unlocked 
 for changes which change may bring to us without our 
 wishing ? 
 31 
 
34 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 Moreover, by representation the true representative becomes 
 impressed with the responsibility of not only representing the 
 majority that chose him, but of the under-dog in the fight 
 the minority, whose representative he is, as a part ,of the 
 people. And history proves not only the right of the minority 
 to be protected, but the majority s need that a minority be pro 
 tected. There is no institution in the administration of 
 justice to my mind of greater value than trial by jury. It is 
 the tribunal of the people and in spite of its occasional miscar 
 riages the vast majority of its verdicts are right. But if a 
 majority of seven were to settle its verdict, I would lose my 
 faith in it for the enforced agreement of the other five is the 
 leaven that enables it to work justice to all and malice to none. 
 And a little reflection shows that minorities are often the 
 people s safeguards, that time and experience are needed to 
 indicate a minority s view, indeed, that those great words, 
 " government of the people, by the people and for the people " 
 had, in the mind of Lincoln, a meaning far deeper than the 
 mere words convey. For, mark you, those words were used 
 by him on a higher plane than a mere question of majority. 
 He called his countrymen to "here highly resolve" and that 
 "under God" government of the people, by the people and 
 for the people should not perish. And what was this highly 
 resolved purpose of Lincoln? His own experience tells the 
 story, for Lincoln was a man not of majorities, but of minor 
 ities. There never was any more direct appeal to the judg 
 ment of the people than the great question which Abraham 
 Lincoln submitted to the people of Illinois in his contest with 
 Douglass. From one end of that state to another, with an ab 
 sence of all passion, with an appeal to reason, with every 
 wealth of light and instruction and intense earnestness, Lin 
 coln presented the great issue of all ages to the people of Illi 
 nois for their determination. But when the votes came the 
 great champion of human liberty found the majority, swept 
 away by the prevailing spirit of the hour, was against him. 
 He, too, for the time being was despised and rejected of men 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 35 
 
 by a triumphant majority and Lincoln and his minority went 
 down to defeat. But though the majority was against him, 
 truth still remained unchanged, for the real question was not 
 of men but of principle. And to Lincoln in his minority, as 
 to many a man in the loneliness of isolated dissent, came that 
 needed assurance that, " in such a controversy the majority 
 principle has no legitimate place. Where the weapon is rea 
 son and not force, there is no magic in a multitude of suf 
 frages. Opinions are to be weighed, not numbered, and if 
 they will not bear the test of reason, it is morally impossible 
 that they stand as law." So, too, in the election of 1860, Lin 
 coln, while elected, represented but a mere minority. The 
 combined votes of Douglass and Breckinridge, all of whom 
 were against him, constituted a great majority of the nation. 
 In the election of 1864, Lincoln was again the representative 
 of a minority, for the principles he stood for would not then 
 have commanded a support of a majority north and south, had 
 all his countrymen voted. But who will say that Lincoln and 
 his minority were wrong, and that Judge Douglass and his 
 majority were right? The Athenians had among their many 
 statutes one dedicated to " time which vindicates," and of one 
 of his noblest characters John Bunyan had only to say, " But 
 Patience was willing to wait." Truly time and patience, and 
 not the recklessness of majorities, are the guardians of minor 
 ity principles. 
 
 And now a closing thought. Franklin lived through one of 
 those great eras of flux and change those days of radical 
 transition, through which men and nations march or flounder in 
 their onward progress. His was a period of tremendous change. 
 The science of government for it is a science and as such 
 worthy of the most thoughtful study was slowly but irresist 
 ibly changing. The autocracy of place and birth and class 
 were crumbling away and all the people were awakening to 
 the possibilities of self-government. The absolutism of hered 
 ity, the dogmatism of religion, the selfishness of nations, were 
 all being subjected to the scrutiny of a dawning patriotism 
 
36 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 and a growing conviction of individual right. The flames of 
 genius burned high, the problems of the present were being 
 illuminated by a thoughtful study of the past. And through 
 the flame and fervor and fusing of awakening ardent brains 
 came the birth and ordering of new conditions. It was a 
 great time for new ideas and the call was for great men. 
 These conditions existed in the old as well as in the new world. 
 But how different the outcome. Germany, lacking any cen 
 tral, towering figure; unblessed by any broad, unifying po 
 litical impulse and cursed by the selfishness of a score of 
 petty sovereigns, fell back into the stagnation of stolid indif 
 ference to await the era of inspiration that came a century 
 later. France, delirious with the new liberty of man which, 
 untempered by dependence on God, swept her into the license 
 of the Revolution, misled by the selfish leadership of a false 
 prophet, who built an empire on the sacrificed blood of misled 
 patriots, drifted back into a century of hopeless indifference, 
 content with nothing, but accepting everything. England, 
 closing her eyes to the reasonable requests of her greatest col 
 ony and misled by the ignorance of a stubborn monarch and 
 an imbecile ministry, succeeded on the one hand in losing her 
 American colonial possessions in the new world, while in the 
 old world Napoleon falsely vaunting himself as the evangel of 
 this reawakened spirit of liberty and progress cunningly drove 
 England into a spirit of antagonism to all that was new 
 simply because it was new and into a blind devotion to all that 
 was old simply because it was old. And so it came about that 
 the splendid new spirit that swept over Europe, a spirit that 
 should have been its civic regeneration, a spirit that called 
 LaFayette and Steuben, Pulaski and Kosciousko, Robert 
 Morris from Liverpool and Albert Gallatin from Switzer 
 land, to this side of the ocean, grasped few of its possibilities 
 because that spirit spent itself in blind gropings in a wilder 
 ness of leaderless wanderings. In such times and in such 
 seething periods of unrest, a weak man may turn a nation into 
 a mob, but it takes a great man to keep a nation from be- 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 37 
 
 coming a mob. And therein lay the difference of outcome on 
 this side the Atlantic from this epoch of unrest. It was the 
 far-seeing vision of such men as Franklin and the fathers 
 wise beyond their day and generation who led the people by 
 the path of sane and sensible self-control in the new order of 
 government. It takes the great need, the great crisis, the 
 great call of a great people, to create great men and to the 
 new world s great, heart-deep cry for leadership, Providence 
 in its own time answered then as it has always answered since 
 when the cry ascends. What a glorious roll of those immor 
 tals answered as the nation s call sounded. With reverence 
 we look up to the long line of the fathers, who each to that 
 clarion call answered Adsum Here am I Washington, 
 Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, of the Revolution, who gave us 
 the Constitution with our country; Marshall and Webster, 
 whose united efforts made that Constitution a living reality; 
 Lincoln and Grant, who kept us, thank God, a united people 
 under it. 
 
 Another period of widespread flux and change is upon us 
 to-day and not upon us alone but upon the whole world. The 
 times are pregnant with unrest and the labors of travail are 
 upon us. The great economic, commercial, social and other 
 changes that invention, expansion, centralization have brought 
 about, perplex, dumfound, dishearten us. We are just awak 
 ening to them and as yet we do not know how to meet them. 
 But the unrest of this great people is an unrest for construc 
 tion and not for destruction and, thank God, an unrest that 
 honestly hungers for leadership and light. The call of the 
 nation to-day is for trusted guiding, and the lack of the nation 
 is our inability to answer that cry. Can we doubt it will be 
 answered ? The past of our country bids us have no doubt as 
 to its future. The years of colonial struggle and unrest ended 
 in Franklin and Washington. The many years of seething 
 uncertainty through our pre-civil war era ended in Lincoln, 
 and our present era of unsettled and unsettling unrest must 
 end in leaders that will speak to the nation as these great men 
 
38 A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 
 
 of the past have spoken, not in volumes of words that are as 
 unheeded as they are soon forgotten, but in words and counsel 
 which, like the revolutionary fathers, shall ring true a cen 
 tury after they are spoken, in words of wise and sane counsel 
 and warning that our children s children shall rise up and 
 call blessed a century hence. I came across lately some words 
 of Sydney Lanier s, penned just after the Civil War, but 
 which strikingly and prophetically voice the unspoken yearn 
 ings of the nation s heart to-day. Lanier was looking forward 
 to that sad, hopeless era of reconstruction ahead of the south 
 land and for which Lincoln, the South s truest and bravest 
 friend, was most needed. He must have had the martyred 
 president in mind when he wrote: "I have been wondering 
 where we are to get a great man that will be tall enough to see 
 over the whole country and to direct that vast undoing of 
 things which have to be accomplished in a few years. It is a 
 situation in which mere cleverness will not begin to work. 
 The horizon of cleverness is too limited; it does not embrace 
 enough of the place of man, to enable a merely clever politi 
 cian such as those in which we abound, to lead matters prop 
 erly at this juncture. The vast generosities which whirl a 
 small revenge out of the way as the winds whirl a leaf; the 
 awful integrity which will pay a debt twice rather than allow 
 the faintest flicker of suspicion about it; the splendid indig 
 nations which are also tender compassions and will in one 
 moment be hustling the money changers out of the Temple and 
 in the next be preaching love to them from the steps of it; 
 where are we to find these ? It is time for a man to arise who 
 is a man." 
 
 My friends, here in this twentieth century the American 
 nation, waiting for a leadership, groping in uncertainty, be 
 wildered by new questions, beset by false prophets, says, with 
 Lanier, " It is time for a man to arise who is a man." When 
 Providence and the unfolding of time shall answer that call, 
 is hidden from our ken, but that time and that Providence we 
 can await with a fortitude and a faith born of the conviction 
 
A Recall of Benjamin Franklin. 39 
 
 that the study of the lives and teachings of Franklin and these 
 great men of the past will in good time recall us to sure and 
 safe and sane paths, horn of a stern resolve that these great 
 and wise men shall not have builded this great nation only to 
 be undone by lesser minds and weaker men and a profound 
 faith that, as in the past so now and hereafter, when the na 
 tion is prepared for leadership, the nation s leader has and 
 always will be found. And with no misgivings but a grounded 
 faith that this nation s mission to its own people and to all 
 humanity, the mission of the standard bearer of constitution 
 ally limited government, let us march forward to the high 
 destinies awaiting us in that spirit in which Lincoln faced the 
 greatest human task ever allotted to man, when in his first 
 inaugural he said, " My countrymen, one and all, think calmly 
 and well on this whole subject. Nothing valuable can be lost 
 by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in 
 hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, 
 that object will be frustrated by taking time, but no good ob 
 ject can be frustrated by it. Intelligence, patriotism, Chris 
 tianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet for 
 saken this favored land are still competent to adjust in the 
 best way all our present difficulties." 
 
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