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I think I now appreciate Dr. Franklin as I ought; but although I can see the utility of

vigorous in acquiring. You may always know the common run, as in other instances, by the soreness with which they feel attacks on the body corporate.

From observations of this nature on the part of a writer, who is neither fond of money, nor competent to an ordinary calculation, the reader will make all the drawbacks that the confession of that incompetency will allow : at the same time, it may be worth his while to consider that, for a reason which could be easily given, improvements of the most wholesale nature, in the condition of mankind, have not been accustomed to issue out of hands the most occupied in detail; and this is particularly remarkable in affairs of trade and commerce, the very changes which have ultimately been turned to the greatest advantage by the parties the most concerned, having been in the first instance opposed by no persons with so much violence. Of this fact, the revolutions in South America have furnished the latest, and not the least, remarkable proof.

Extremes, however, meet oftener than they are supposed to do. The greatest calculators I ever met with, were men who had come to the conclusion, that the greatest of all the advantages of calculation consisted in knowing how much better the world could do without it. They even hoped that by means of the knowledge of this fact, explained by calculation itself, the world would ultimately be brought to their opinion; and certainly, if any thing could do it with some, that would be the way; but it is experiment, recommended

such publications as his Almanack for a rising commercial state, and hold it useful as a memorandum to uncalculating persons like myself, who happen to live in an old one, I think it has no business either in commercial nations long established, or in others who do not found their happiness in that sort of power. Franklin, with all his abilities, is but at the head of those who think that man lives " by bread alone." He will commit none of the follies, none of the intolerances, the absence of which is necessary to the perfection of his system; and in setting his face against these, he discountenances a great number of things very inimical to higher speculations. But he was no more a fit representative of what human nature largely requires, and may reasonably hope to attain to, than negative represents posi

by the progress of opinion, and hastened and forced by necessity, that must produce this and all other changes.

For the assertion that Dr. Franklin cut off his son with a shilling, my only authority is family tradition. It is observable, however, that the friendliest of his biographers are not only forced to admit that he seemed a little too fond of money, but notice the mysterious secrecy in which his family history is involved.

tive, or the clearing away a ground in the backsettlements, and setting to work upon it, represents the work in its completion. Something of the pettiness and materiality of his first occupation always stuck to him. He took nothing for a truth or a matter-of-fact that he could not handle, as it were, like his types; and yet, like all men of this kind, he was liable, when put out of the ordinary pale of his calculations, to fall into the greatest errors, and substitute the integrity of his reputation for that of whatsoever he chose to do. From never doing wrong in little things, he conceived that he could do no wrong in great; and, in the most deliberate act of his life, he showed he had grievously mistaken himself. He was, I allow, one of the cardinal great men of his time. He was Prudence. But he was not what he took himself for,-all the other Virtues besides; and, inasmuch as he was deficient in those, he was deficient even in his favourite one. He was not Temperance; for, in the teeth of his capital recommendations of that virtue, he did not scruple to get burly and big with the enjoyments that he cared for. He was not Justice;

for he knew not how to see fair play between his own wisdom and that of a thousand wants and aspirations, of which he knew nothing: and he cut off his son with a shilling, for differing with him in politics. Lastly, he was not Fortitude; for, having few passions and no imagination, he knew not what it was to be severely tried; and if he had been, there is every reason to conclude, from the way in which he treated his son, that his self-love would have been the part in which he felt the torture; and that as his Justice was only arithmetic, so his Fortitude would have been nothing but stubbornness. If Franklin had been the only great man of his time, he would merely have contributed to make the best of a bad system, and so hurt the world by prolonging it; but, luckily, there were the French and English philosophers besides, who saw farther than he did, and provided for higher wants. I feel grateful to him, for one, inasmuch as he extended the sphere of liberty, and helped to clear the earth of the weeds of sloth and ignorance, and the wild beasts of superstition; but when he comes to build final homes

for us, there I rejoice that wiser hands interfere. His line and rule are not every thing; they are not even a tenth part of it. Cocker's numbers are good; but those of Plato and Pythagoras have their merits too, or we should have been made of dry bones and tangents, and not had the fancies in our heads, and the hearts beating in our bosoms, that make us what we are. We should not even have known that Cocker's numbers were worth any thing; nor would Dr. Franklin himself have played on the harmonica, albeit he must have done it in a style very different from that of Milton or Cimarosa. Finally, the writer of this passage on the Doctor would not have ventured to give his opinion of so great a man in so explicit a manner. I should not have ventured to give it, had I not been backed by so many powerful interests of humanity, and had I not suffered in common, and more than in common, with the rest of the world, from a system which, under the guise of economy and social advantage, tends to double the love of wealth and the hostility of competition, to force the best things down to a level with the

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