eral Assembly, until 1786, when he returned from Paris at the close of the American Revolution, he was almost continually in the public service, and this without compensation. Big and little things alike claimed attention. Now he was organizing a police or fire-department or local militia; now putting a street-lamp before his gate and paving his sidewalk to arouse public spirit; building an Academy of Science; a church free for all denominations; collecting books for the first free circulating library; organizing a system of colonial defense against the Indian; inventing rockers for his easy-chair and a portable fireplace, called the Franklin stove, and refusing to take out patents. He always declared that as we are indebted to the ingenuity of men in the past, so it is only a duty to give our own contrivances to the present and future.
After 1760 (his 54th year) Franklin spent a quarter of a century abroad in the service of his country. His discovery of the identity of lightning and electricity had long before made him the best-known American in Europe. Learned societies and universities welcomed him, and he soon won equal distinction as a diplomat. Ten years he spent in London. He got the stamp-act repealed. An eminent English statesman declares to-day that had the king and Parliament accepted Franklin's just contention that the American colonies were self-governing, owing allegiance only to the sovereign, the Revolutionary War might never have been fought. Franklin, after a decade of working in vain for peace with honor and justice, returned to help frame the Declaration of Independence, to place $20,000 of his fortune at the service of Congress, and then cross the sea to win the help of France in the cause of American liberty. His position in Paris, although he represented poor, rebel colonies whose success seemed unlikely, was extraordinarily influential, unprecedented and never again equalled in the history of diplomacy. Camp and court and the world of science were at his feet. Never before had Europe seen a man at once so wise and witty, so urbane and with such upsetting ideas of the equality of men and of the duties of rulers. His simple dress became the fashion; his benign face adorned ornaments of cameo; his portrait was in college, palace and cottage. He was the first great plebeian standing upright before kings, and he fired the imagination of the people. This is believed to have had its influence in hastening the French Revolution.
It is flattering to our pride to learn that the mind, character and versatile genius of Franklin have been called an epitome of all that is best in the typical American. He won as the best among us win,—by straightforwardness. He introduced “shirt-sleeve” diplomacy into Europe; he had shrewdness, good nature, open-mindedness, persistence and infinite knowledge of the world and of human nature.
When Franklin returned to America, he was in his 86th year and begged for rest; but he became chairman of the municipal council, a member of the constitutional convention that drafted the constitution; and he organized the postal service, travelling in a carriage through every state. Conquered at last by the infirmities of age, he continued to give scientific discoveries to the world. His last public act was to affix his signature to a memorial to the state legislature, as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Abolition in 1790 brings Franklin into touch with Lincoln three quarters of a century later. He seems equally in touch with wireless telegraphy, aerial navigation, the currency and other questions of to-day. No life of him is comparable to his own autobiography. As literature it is a classic, and as a human document it is unsurpassed in its illuminating candor.
Franklin, Admiral Sir John. To the man who perishes in a brave cause the world pays peculiar honor, and when his death is obscure and lonely and his grave unmarked, it adds tender regret. This heroic Arctic explorer is one of the few whose memory is so enshrined in the hearts of men. To hear his story is to be, not saddened by his fate, but uplifted because such a man, and one of our own Saxon blood, has lived and shown how a devoted man may die.
It is not improbable that the British admiral sprang from the same north-of-England stock as our own Benjamin Franklin. He was born on April 16, 1786, in Lincolnshire, a county that adjoins Northamptonshire, whence Benjamin Franklin's father had emigrated a hundred years before. The name is old Saxon for free-holder, and the ancestors of both were small landed-proprietors or tradesmen—thrifty, industrious, pious, unremarkable. At 14 John Franklin was on the quarterdeck of a naval vessel; at 15 in the battle of Copenhagen where Nelson won his first laurels. Two months later the boy sailed with an expedition to explore and map the coast of Australia, then almost unknown. Here he acquired skill in surveying, deep-sea sounding and astronomical observation that fitted him for his work as a scientific explorer. Adventure marked the gallant boy for its own. He was wrecked on a coral island; he was signal officer on the Bellerophon at Trafalgar; he commanded a vessel at the battle of New Orleans; at 32 he was a minor officer in a polar expedition. At 41, with the rank of captain, he commanded an expedition to map Mackenzie River. Honors crowded
