Page:Benjamin Franklin, self-revealed; a biographical and critical study based mainly on his own writings (IA cu31924092892177).pdf/33

 printing house even if her parents had to mortgage their house in the loan office; how partly by sheer force and pinching economy and partly by dexterity and finesse, sometimes verging upon cunning, he pushed himself further and further along the road to fortune, and finally how he was so successful with the help of his Art of Virtue, despite occasional stumblings and slips, in realizing his dream of moral perfection as to be able to write complacently upon the margin of the Autobiography, "nothing so likely to make a man's fortune as virtue." It is things like these in the Autobiography that have tended to create in minds, which know Franklin only in this narrative, the idea that he was a niggard, a squalid utilitarian and even a little of a rogue; though the same Autobiography witnesses also that he was not so engrossed with his own selfish interests as not to find time for the enlarged projects of public utility which to this day render it almost impossible for us to think of Philadelphia without recalling the figure of Franklin. Si monumentum requiris circumspice, was the proud inscription placed over the grave of Sir Christopher Wren in the city where his genius had designed so many edifices. The same inscription might be aptly placed over the grave of Franklin in Christ Church yard in the city where his public spirit and wisdom laid the foundations of so much that has proved enduring.

There is unquestionably a shabby side to the Autobiography, despite the inspiring sacrifice of his physical wants which Franklin made in his boyhood to gratify his intellectual cravings, the high promptings which the appetites and unregulated impulses of his unguarded youth were powerless to stifle, the dauntless resolution and singleness of purpose with which he defied and conquered his adverse star, the wise moderation of his hour of vicotry, the disinterested and splendid forms of social service to which he devoted his sagacious and fruitful