Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/208

204 form'd plans of the same kind. A previous question was first taken, whether a union should be established, which passed in the affirmative unanimously. A committee was then appointed, one member from each colony, to consider the several plans and report Mine happened to be preferr'd, and, with a few amendments, was accordingly reported. Mr. Bancroft says of this statesman's plan: New England colonies in their infancy had given birth to a confederacy. William Penn, in 1697, had proposed an annual congress of all the provinces on the continent of America, with power to regulate commerce. Franklin revived the great idea, and breathed into it enduring life. As he descended the Hudson, the people of New York thronged about him to welcome him; and he, who had first entered their city as a runaway apprentice, was revered as the mover of American Union.

Instruction as well as interest calls for some attention in these pages to the great political movements of the day, seeing that the hand which was so often seen and felt in them was the same that was in like kind seen and felt in the local institution whose narrative we are pursuing; and we can thus obtain the lights and shadows of its life which might otherwise remain hidden from our eyes. We turn now to Mr. Smith's letter to Dr. Peters, which is doubly entertaining as illustrating how in less than a two months' domicile in the colony his versatile mind had already formed decided views on the political questions of the day, and which in the present case would be acceptable to his correspondent:

Philadelphia 18 July 1754. Dear Sir. As we have not heard from you this Post, I am at some loss how to direct to you, but presume this will find you at New York. I