Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/752

 716 FRANKLIN authority. He planned an appeal for aid from the king of the French, and wrote the instructions of Silas Deane, a member of the congress, who was to convey it ; he was sent as one of three commissioners to Canada, in one of the most inclement months of the year, on what proved an in effectual mission to persuade the Canadians to join the new colonial union ; he was elected a delegate from Phil adelphia to the conference which met on the 18th of June 1776, and which, in the name of the people of the colonies, formally renounced all allegiance to King George, and called for an election of delegates to a convention to form a con stitutional government for the United Colonies. He was also one of the committee of five which drew up what is known as the &quot; Declaration of Independence.&quot; When about to sign it, Hancock, one of his colleagues, is reported to have said, &quot; We must be unanimous ; there must be no pulling different ways ; we must all hang together.&quot; &quot; Yes,&quot; replied Franklin, &quot; we must hang together, or we will be pretty sure to hang separately.&quot; He was also chosen president of the convention called to frame a constitution for the State of Pennsylvania, which commenced its session on the 16th of July 1776. He was selected by congress to discuss terms of peace with Admiral Lord Howe, who had arrived in New York harbour on the 12th of July 1776, to take com mand of the British naval forces in American waters, and on the 26th of September, upon the receipt of encouraging news from France, he was chosen unanimously to be one of three to repair to the court of Louis XVI. and solicit his support. His colleagues were John Adams, destined to be Washington s successor in the presidency, and Arthur Lee, Franklin s successor in the agency in London. Franklin, now in the seventieth year of his age, proceeded to collect all the money he could command, amounting to between 3000 or 4000, lent it to congress, and with two grandsons set sail in the sloop of war &quot; Reprisal&quot; on the 27th day of October, arriving at Nantes on the 7th of December, and at Paris towards the end of the same month. With his usual tact and forecast he found quarters in a house in Passy (then a suburb but now a part of the city of Paris) belonging to an active friend of the cause he represented Le Ray de Chaumont who held influential relations with the court, and through whom he was enabled to be in the fullest communication with the French Govern ment without compromising it. At the time of Franklin s arrival in Paris, he was already one of the most talked about men in the world. He was a member of every important learned society in Europe ; he was a member, and one of the managers of the Royal Society, and one of eight foreign members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Three editions of his scientific works had already appeared in Paris, and a new edition, much enlarged, had recently appeared in London. To all these advantages he added a political purpose the dismemberment of the British empire which was entirely congenial to every citizen of France. &quot; Franklin s reputa tion,&quot; wrote Mr Adams, who, unhappily, was never able to regard his colleague s fame with entire equanimity, &quot; was more universal than that of Leibnitz or Newton, Frederick or Voltaire, and his character more beloved and esteemed than all of them. ... If a collection could be made of all the gazettes of Europe for the latter half of the 18th century a greater number of panegyrical paragraphs upon le grand Franklin would appear, it is believed, than upon any other man that ever lived.&quot; &quot;Franklin s appearance in the French salons, even before he began to negotiate, &quot; says the German historian Schlosser, &quot; was an event of great importance to the whole of Europe. . . . His dress, the simplicity of his external appearance, the friendly meekness of the old man, and the apparent humility of the Quaker, procured for Freedom a, mass of votaries among the court circles who used to be alarmed at its coarseness and unsophisticated truths.&quot; We may here add that such was the number of portraits, busts, and medallions of him in circulation before he left Paris that he would have been recognized from them by nearly every adult citizen in any part of the civilized world. Writing to his daughter in the third year of his residence in Paris, of a medallion to which she had alluded, he says &quot; A variety of others have been made since, of different sizes ; some to be set in the lids of snuff-boxes and some so small as to be worn in rings, and the numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies are spread everywhere) have made your father s face as well known as the moon, so that he durst not do anything that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it.&quot; The story of Franklin s mission to France, as recorded in his own correspondence, is singularly interesting and romantic. In these respects it is difficult to find its parallel in the literature of diplomacy. Its results may be summed up in a few words. He became at once, as already stated, an object of greater popular interest than any other man in France, an interest which, during bis eight years sojourn there, seemed always on the increase. Streets in numerous cities, and several societies, were named after him ; the French Academy paid him its highest honours, and he conferred more distinction upon any salon he frequented than it could reciprocate. He animated French society with a boundless enthusiasm for the cause of the rebel colonists, persuaded the Government that the interests of France required her to aid them, obtained a treaty of alliance at a crisis in their fortunes in the winter of 1777, when such an alliance was decisive, and the great moral advantage of a royal frigate to convey the news of it to America. A few months later he signed the treaties which bound the two countries to mutual friendship and defence, and on the morning of the 20th March 1778 the three envoys were formally received by the king at Ver sailles, and through them the country they represented was first introduced into the family of independent nations. In February of the following year General Lafayette, who had distinguished himself as a volunteer in the rebel army, returning to France on leave, brought a commission from the American congress to Dr Franklin as sole plenipoten tiary of the United States to the court of France. From this time until the close of the war it was Franklin s para mount duty to encourage the French Government to supply the colonists with money. How successfully he discharged this duty may be inferred from the following statement of the advances made by France upon his solicitation : In 1777, 2,000,000 francs; in 1778, 3,000,000 francs; in 1779, 1,000,000 francs; in 1780, 4,000,000 francs; in 1781, 10,000,000 francs; in 1782, 6,000,000 francs; in all, 26,000,000 francs. To obtain these aids at a time when France was not only at war, but practically bankrupt, and in defiance of the strenuous resistance of Necker, the minister of finance, was an achievement, the credit of which, there is the best reason for believing, was mainly due to the matchless diplomacy of Franklin. Writing to the French minister in Philadelphia, December 4, 1780, the Count de Vergennes said &quot; As to Dr Franklin, his conduct leaves congress nothing to desire. It is as zealous and patriotic as it is wise and circumspect, and you may affirm with assurance, on all occasions where you think proper, that the method he pursues is much more efficacious than it would be if he were to assume a tone of importunity in multiplying his demands, and above all in supporting them by menaces (an allusion to the indiscreet conduct of Franklin s colleagues), to which we should give neither credence nor value, and which would only tend to render him personally disagreeable.&quot;