Page:History of the University of Pennsylvania - Montgomery (1900).djvu/232

228 the appealing force of those words we find in the votes of Assembly, which the people employed to express their hope that redress would be found at Home in England. 6 The Revolutionary War, which culminated a score of years later overshadows to us the stirring politics and the Indian Warfare which lay in a long series of years behind that; but upon a study of those times we must reach some realization of the stir and commotion, the fears and anxieties of those earlier years in which our forefathers were being schooled for greater things. The College and Academy furnished from its Trustees men who joined in all the issues of the time, and no meeting could convene in the interests of their young institution without some of them exchanging sentiments on the events of the day. Among the Trustees all shades of political opinion and religious thought were represented, and the politics of those days were as sharply defined and as penetrating as any we ourselves are participants in; but we cannot to-day measure the happy influences which must have flowed from these meetings, the common interests on. behalf of the Academy must have smoothed away the asperities of the Assembly or the Press, at the least for the time being, and friendships were maintained and continued which otherwise might have been severed. But the growing public concerns in which Franklin became involved by his own aptitude and the selection of either Assembly or Governor, was now telling on his attendance at the College and Academy and the meetings of its trustees; and finally his long absences abroad made a complete severance, and the way was soon open for the uncharity of politics to lessen his influence and mar his plans in the great work of a firm and sound'educational institution which was second in his affections to no other of his creations. 6 It was in the same light, that a few years later the Vestry of Christ Church at a meeting held 4 December, 1760, voted an address to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, of thanks for the Society's compliance with their request of the previous year in the disposition of the Jauncey bequest, by directing " Chuch Warden Harrison to draw a fair copy and send it home"