Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/748

 712 FRANKLIN and proposed to start him in business for himself, and to give him the means of going to England and purchasing the material necessary to equip a new printing office. Franklin, rather against the advice of his father, whom he revisited in Boston to consult about it, embraced the governor s pro posal, took passage for London, which he paid with his own money (the governor being more ready with excuses than coin), and on reaching London in December 1724, where he had been assured he would find a draft to cover his expenses, discovered too late that he had been the dupe of Keith, and that he must rely upon his own exertions for his daily bread. He readily found employment at Palmer s, then a famous printer in Bartholomew Close, where, and afterwards at Wall s printing house, he continued to be employed until the 23d of July 1726, when he again set sail for Philadelphia iu company with a Mr Dunham, whose acquaintance he had made on his voyage out, and who tempted him back by the offer of a position as clerk in a commercial business which he proposed to establish in Philadelphia. While in London Franklin had been engaged in setting up the type of a second edition of Wollaston s Religion of Nature. The perusal of this work led him to write and print a small edition of a pamphlet, which he entitled A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain. Had he deferred printing it a few years, it would probably never have been heard of, for he lived to be rather ashamed of it. It procured him, however, the acquaintance of Dr Mandeville, author of the Fable of the Bees, whom he described as a most facetious and enter taining companion. Only a few months after Franklin s return to Philadelphia, the death of Mr Dunham put an end to his career as a merchant. While awaiting something more favourable, he was induced by large wages to return to his old employer Keimer. This led to his making the acquaintance of a young man of the name of Meredith, whom he afterwards described as a &quot; Welsh Pennsylvania!!, thirty years of age, bred to country work, honest, sensible, who had a great deal of solid observation, was something of a, reader, but given to drink.&quot; He was learning the printer s art, and offered to furnish the capital to establish a new printing office his father being a man of some means if Franklin would join him and direct the business. This proposal was accepted, the types were sent for, a house was rented at 20 a year, part of which was sublet to a glazier who was to board them, and before the expiration of a year from his return to Philadelphia, Franklin, for the first time in his life, was in business for himself. &quot; We had scarce opened our letters and put our press in order,&quot; he says, &quot; before George House, an acquaintance of mine, brought a countryman to us whom he had met in the street inquiring for a printer. All our cash was now expended in the variety of particulars we had been obliged to procure, and this countryman s five shillings, being our first-fruits, and coming so seasonably, gave us more pleasure than any crown I have since earned, and the gratitude I felt towards House has made me often more ready than perhaps I should otherwise have been to assist young beginners.&quot; Almost simultaneously, in September 1729, he bought for a nominal price the Pennsylvania Gazette, a news paper which Keimer had started nine months before to defeat a similar project of Franklin s which accidentally came to his knowledge. It had only 90 subscribers. His superior arrangement of the paper, his new type, some spirited remarks on a controversy then waging between the Massachusetts assembly and Governor Burnet (a son of the celebrated Bishop Gilbert Burnet) brought his paper into immediate notice, and his success, both as a printer and as a journalist, was from that time forth assured and complete. The influence which he was enabled to exert by his pen through his paper, and by his industry and good sense, bore abundant fruit during the next seventeen years, during which he was at the head of journalism in America. In 1731 he established the first circulating library on the con tinent ; in 1732 he published the first of the Poor Richard s Almanacs, a publication which was continued for twenty- live years, and attained a marvellous popularity. The annual sale was about 10,000 copies, at that time far in ex cess of any other publication in the colonies, and equivalent to a sale at the present time of not less than 300,000. In the next ten years he acquired a convenient familiarity with the French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin languages. In 173G Franklin was chosen a clerk of the general assembly, and was re-elected the following year. He was then elected a member of assembly, to which dignity he was re- elected for ten successive years, and was appointed one of the commissioners to treat with the Indians at Carlisle. In 1737 Colonel Spotswood, then postmaster-general, appointed him deputy postmaster at Philadelphia. About this time he organized the first police force and fire company in the colonies, and a few years later initiated the movements which resulted in the foundation of the university of Pennsylvania and of the American Philosophical Society, in the organization of a militia force, in the paving of the streets, and in the foundation of a hospital ; in fact, he furnished the impulse to nearly every measure or project which contemplated the welfare and prosperity of the city in which he lived. It was during this period, and in the midst of these very miscellaneous avocations, that he made the discoveries in electricity which have secured him undis puted rank among the most eminent of natural philosophers. He was the first to demonstrate that lightning and elec tricity were one. The Pioyal Society, when an account of his experiments, which had been transmitted to a scien tific friend in England, was laid before it, made sport of them, and refused to print them. Through the recom mendation of his friend they were printed, however, in an extra number of the Gentleman s Magazine, of which the publisher ultimately sold five editions. A copy chancing to fall into the hands of Buffon, he saw their value, and advised their translation and publication in France, where they immediately attractsd attention. The &quot; Philadelphia experiments,&quot; as they were called, were performed in the presence of the royal family in Paris, and became the sen sation of the period. The Pioyal Society of London found it necessary to reconsider its action, published a summary of the experiments in its Transactions, and, as Franklin afterwards averred, more than made him amends for the slight with which it had before treated him, by electing him an honorary member, exempting him from the cus tomary payments, and sending him for the rest of his life a copy of the Transactions. Since the introduction of the art of printing, it would be difficult to name any dis covery which has exerted a more important influence upon the industries and habits of mankind. In 1754 a- war with France was impending, and Franklin, who by this time had become the most important man in the colony of Pennsylvania, was sent to a congress of com missioners from the different colonies, ordered by the Lords of Trade to convene at Albany, to confer with the chiefs of the Six Nations for their common defence. Franklin there submitted a plan for organizing a system of colonial defence which was adopted and reported; it provided for a president-general of all the colonies to be appointed by the crown, and a grand council to be chosen by the representa tives of the people of the several colonies. The colonies so united, he thought, would be sufficiently strong to defend themselves, and there would then be no need of troops from England. Had this course been pursued, the subsequent pretence for taxing America would not have been furnished, and the bloody contest it occasioned might have bee.u