Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/345

Rh winning the battle by systematic effort. At first his principles, or what he called so, hung rather loosely about him. As a boy he had adopted vegetarianism, sincerely believing in it. He got rid of it in this way: a few months after his arrival in Philadelphia he had occasion to go to Boston for the purpose of seeing his father. On his way back the sloop on which he travelled was becalmed off Block Island and the seamen caught some cod. Young Franklin had formerly been very fond of fried fish; and when the cod came hot out of the frying pan “I balanced some time between principle and inclination,” he frankly says in his autobiography, “till I recollected that, when the fish were opened, I saw smaller fish taken out of their stomachs; then I thought: ‘If you eat one another, I do not see why I may not eat you.’ So I dined upon cod very heartily, and continued to eat with other people, returning only now and then occasionally to a vegetable diet.” “So convenient it is,” he adds, “to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

This was quite witty. But it is upon reasoning of just this kind that smart men yield to temptations which smell well enough to excite an appetite, and then, thus getting rid of their principles, gradually become bad men. Young Franklin was upon a slippery path. A friend of his brother's at Newport entrusted him with a sum of money to be collected from a debtor at Philadelphia, and to be transmitted on demand. Franklin collected the money and used a large part of it for himself and his friends, thus virtually embezzling it—a thing which subsequently caused him much trouble. But still worse: Governor Keith of Pennsylvania induced Franklin to undertake a voyage to London, to purchase an outfit for a new printing-office. Before leaving Philadelphia, Franklin exchanged promises of marriage with Miss