Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/246

 old and honored age, and he died, his head stored with worldly wisdom and his pockets filled with the accumulations of his long and eventful life. He left behind him an autobiography in which, in his own inimitable way, he told how he personally had organized all the charitable and learned institutions that had grown up while he was a resident of this city. This autobiography, beautiful in structure, was translated into the different languages of Europe and he gained extended fame. Over the library in which were the books that had been collected by that learned scholar, James Logan, was placed the statue of Benjamin Franklin. The central window of that great University, which was led to success by Dr. William Smith, against his opposition, shows the record of the great achievements of Benjamin Franklin, and over every house and every barn in the land a lightning rod pointing heavenward testifies to the popular judgment of his scientific attainments and his eternal reward.

I have been asked to respond to the toast “The Keystone and Plymouth Rock.” For the long line of distinguished men New England has produced, Pennsylvania has only to express her sincere appreciation and her emphatic approval. In all her efforts to ameliorate the condition of the human race and to advance the cause of literature and of science, Pennsylvania has had the warm support of the sons of New England. The American Philosophical Society, which was the first of our scientific institutions, has had in that blessed land many successors. The Law Department of the University of Pennsylvania, established in 1791, and the Medical Department of the University, established in 1765, have been followed by departments devoted to the same learned pursuits at Harvard. The resolutions adopted in town meeting in the city of Philadelphia on the 16th of October, 1773, forbidding the landing of tea on these shores, were adopted and accepted in precisely the same words by the people of Boston in their town meeting on the 6th of November of the same year. The principles of the Revolution, the keynote of which, set by John Dickinson in his Farmers' Letters, echoed across Boston Common, were carried to their logical conclusion by John Adams of Massachusetts.

The adoption of the Constitution of the United States in Pennsylvania in December, 1787, was followed by its adoption in Massachusetts in February, 1788. The principles of religious liberty, established by Penn in Pennsylvania, in 1682, now prevail in every hamlet and township from Maine to Connecticut. The great struggle with slavery in this country, begun in the town of Germantown in 1688, to which Benjamin Lay, John Woolman 232