Page:American Historical Review, Vol. 23.djvu/287

Rh combination singing praises of one man or one policy; at no time do we trace that blind sacrifice of opinion which marks the devoted adherent to faction, to party, to Church or to State. There has been no suggestion of general interference by the state to impose upon the people a single interpretation of policy outside of law. The opposition has been as free as the supporters of government, and the third or independent party, or the silent independent voter, tends to correct such an overwhelming drift as could be interpreted as an unrestricted mandate from the people to their representatives, or from the government to the people. Except in great crises the American conception of liberty of speech has been maintained, and in the severe crises, as Rhodes says of the War of Secession, the great principles of liberty have not been invalidated by the exercise of extraordinary powers, although the arbitrary exercise of those powers was to be condemned. Even against the government the citizen can invoke the protection of the courts.

Self-editing finds expression in autobiography, and the one great example of American autobiography is that of Franklin, written, be it remembered, late in life, and never finished. Unable to live his life over again in fact, he took the nearest to it, to make a recollection of that life as durable as possible by putting it down in writing. And he gratified his vanity in so doing, believing that vanity is "often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action; and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life". The entire relation is redolent of a studied frankness that lulls the reader into a forgetfulness of much in Franklin's career that a moralist would dwell upon. I almost fancy that Cotton Mather would have been pleased to preach the last sermon heard by the condemned Benjamin Franklin. And the circumstance would have been possible, for Franklin was born in 1706 and Mather lived until 1728. The autobiography was first published in 1817, and could occasion no serious controversy; but the papers printed with the autobiography by the grandson did arouse comment on both sides of the ocean, more for what had been omitted than for what had been included. The question of an interference by the British government is not one which need delay us in passing. That government and that people have not shown strong inclinations to edit their expressions on America and its history, least of all at the time the Franklin volumes appeared. Jefferson intimated that may have been "an accomplice in the parricide of the memory of his immortal