Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/359

Rh later a member of the assembly, also an alderman and a justice of the peace. And then he was appointed Postmaster-General of the colonies. He quickened the snail pace of the mails, straightened the bridle paths, shortened the time it took a letter to go from Philadelphia to Boston and vice versa from three weeks to one week and a half, and made the postal service yield an annual revenue. He served as a peace commissioner in making Indian treaties. And then he invented the American Union. The war between France and England had begun, the most memorable and dramatic incidents of which were Braddock's defeat and the capture of Quebec. Delegates of the colonies north of the Potomac met at Albany to consider what should be done for defense. Franklin's common-sense spoke: Let the colonies unite and they will be strong. He laid before the convention a plan for a union foreshadowing in its principal features the Constitution of the United States adopted thirty-five years later,—in fact substantially the same plan adopted by the British government one hundred years later as the sum of wisdom in the organization of the Dominion of Canada. It was, however, rejected at the time, but the idea of union remained alive. Indeed, it had been suggested before Franklin, by William Penn in 1697, and by Coxe in 1722—but only theoretically. Franklin applied it first to a given state of things as a remedy for pressing evils. And when his plan was rejected and another substituted by the British government which involved the taxing of the colonies by act of Parliament, it was Franklin who, with prophetic utterance, pronounced that axiom: “No taxation without representation,” which repelled the stamp act, and which became the first watchword of American patriotism in its struggle for final independence. There was the American statesman of common-sense, fully developed.