the Language of the New Testament and apply’d to the Christian State and Worship. By I. Watts . . ., Philadelphia: Printed by B. F. and H. M. for Thomas Godfrey, and Sold at his Shop, 1729. The first novel printed in America was Franklin’s reprint in 1744 of Pamela; and the first American translation from the classics which was printed in America was a version by James Logan (1674–1751) of Cato’s Moral Distichs (1735). In 1744 he published another translation of Logan’s, Cicero On Old Age, which Franklin thought typographically the finest book he had ever printed. In 1733 he had established a press in Charleston, South Carolina, and soon after did the same in Lancaster, Pa., in New Haven, Conn., in New York, in Antigua, in Kingston, Jamaica, and in other places. Personally he had little connexion with the Philadelphia printing office after 1748, when David Hall became his partner and took charge of it. But in 1753 he was eagerly engaged in having several of his improvements incorporated in a new press, and more than twenty years after was actively interested in John Walter’s scheme of “logography.” In France he had a private press in his house in Passy, on which he printed “bagatelles.” Franklin’s work as a publisher is for the most part closely connected with his work in issuing the Gazette and Poor Richard’s Almanack (a summary of the proverbs from which appeared in the number for 1758, and has often been reprinted—under such titles as Father Abraham’s Speech, and The Way to Wealth).[1]
Of much of Franklin’s work as an author something has already been said. Judged as literature, the first place belongs to his Autobiography, which unquestionably ranks among the few great autobiographies ever written. His style in its simplicity, facility and clearness owed something to De Foe, something to Cotton Mather, something to Plutarch, more to Bunyan and to his early attempts to reproduce the manner of the third volume of the Spectator; and not the least to his own careful study of word usage. From Xenophon’s Memorabilia he learned when a boy the Socratic method of argument. Swift he resembled in the occasional broadness of his humour, in his brilliantly successful use of sarcasm and irony,[2] and in his mastery of the hoax. Balzac said of him that he “invented the lightning-rod, the hoax (’le canard’) and the republic.” Among his more famous hoaxes were the “Edict of the King of Prussia” (1773), already described; the fictitious supplement to the Boston Chronicle, printed on his private press at Passy in 1782, and containing a letter with an invoice of eight packs of 954 cured, dried, hooped and painted scalps of rebels, men, women and children, taken by Indians in the British employ; and another fictitious Letter from the Count de Schaumberg to the Baron Hohendorf commanding the Hessian Troops in America (1777)—the count’s only anxiety is that not enough men will be killed to bring him in moneys he needs, and he urges his officer in command in America “to prolong the war . . . for I have made arrangements for a grand Italian opera, and I do not wish to be obliged to give it up.”[3]
Closely related to Franklin’s political pamphlets are his writings on economics, which, though undertaken with a political or practical purpose and not in a purely scientific spirit, rank him as the first American economist. He wrote in 1729 A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency, which argued that a plentiful currency will make rates of interest low and will promote immigration and home manufactures, and which did much to secure the further issue of paper money in Pennsylvania. After the British Act of 1750 forbidding the erection or the operating of iron or steel mills in the colonies, Franklin wrote Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind and the Peopling of Countries (1751); its thesis was that manufactures come to be common only with a high degree of social development and with great density of population, and that Great Britain need not, therefore, fear the industrial competition of the colonies, but it is better known for the estimate (adopted by Adam Smith) that the population of the colonies would double every quarter-century; and for the likeness to Malthus’s[4] “preventive check” of its statement: “The greater the common fashionable expense of any rank of people the more cautious they are of marriage.” His Positions to be examined concerning National Wealth (1769) shows that he was greatly influenced by the French physiocrats after his visit to France in 1767. His Wail of a Protected Manufacturer voices a protest against protection as raising the cost of living; and he held that free trade was based on a natural right. He knew Kames, Hume and Adam Smith, and corresponded with Mirabeau, “the friend of Man.” Some of the more important of his economic theses, as summarized by W. A. Wetzel, are: that money as coin may have more than its bullion value; that natural interest is determined by the rent of land valued at the sum of money loaned—an anticipation of Turgot; that high wages are not inconsistent with a large foreign trade; that the value of an article is determined by the amount of labour necessary to produce the food consumed in making the article; that manufactures are advantageous but agriculture only is truly productive; and that when practicable (as he did not think it practicable at the end of the War of Independence) state revenue should be raised by direct tax.
Franklin as a scientist[5] and as an inventor has been decried by experts as an amateur and a dabbler; but it should be remembered that it was always his hope to retire from public life and devote himself to science. In the American Philosophical Society (founded 1743) scientific subjects were much discussed. Franklin wrote a paper on the causes of earthquakes for his Gazette of the 15th of December 1737; and he eagerly collected material to uphold his theory that waterspouts and whirlwinds resulted from the same causes. In 1743, from the circumstance that an eclipse not visible in Philadelphia because of a storm had been observed in Boston, where the storm although north-easterly did not occur until an hour after the eclipse, he surmised that storms move against the wind along the Atlantic coast. In the year before (1742) he had planned the “Pennsylvania fire-place,” better known as the “Franklin stove,” which saved fuel, heated all the room, and had the same principle as the hot-air furnace; the stove was never patented by Franklin, but was described in his pamphlet dated 1744. He was much engaged at the same time in remedying smoking chimneys, and as late as 1785 wrote to Jan Ingenhousz, physician to the emperor of Austria, on chimneys and draughts; smoking street lamps he remedied by a simple contrivance. The study of electricity he took up in 1746 when he first saw a Leyden jar, in the manipulation of which he became expert and which he improved by the use of granulated lead in the place of water for the interior armatures; he recognized that condensation is due to the dielectric and not to the metal coatings. A note in his diary, dated the 7th of November 1749, shows that he had then
- ↑ “Seventy-five editions of it have been printed in English, fifty-six in French, eleven in German and nine in Italian. It has been translated into Spanish, Danish, Swedish, Welsh, Polish, Gaelic, Russian, Bohemian, Dutch, Catalan, Chinese, modern Greek and phonetic writing. It has been printed at least four hundred times, and is to-day as popular as ever.”—P. L. Ford, in The Many-Sided Franklin (1899).
- ↑ Both Swift and Franklin made sport of the typical astrologer almanack-maker.
- ↑ Another hoax was Franklin’s parable against religious persecution thrown into Scriptural form and quoted by him as the fifty-first chapter of Genesis. In a paper on a “Proposed New Version of the Bible” he paraphrased a few verses of the first chapter of Job, making them a satiric attack on royal government; but the version may well rank with these hoaxes, and even modern writers have been taken in by it, regarding it as a serious proposal for a “modernized” version and decrying it as poor taste. Matthew Arnold, for example, declared this an instance in which Franklin was lacking in his “imperturbable common sense”; and J. B. McMaster, though devoting several pages to its discussion, very ingenuously declares it “beneath criticism.”
- ↑ Malthus quoted Franklin in his first edition, but it was not until the second that he introduced the theory of the “preventive check.” Franklin noted the phenomenon with disapproval in his advocacy of increased population; Malthus with approval in his search for means to decrease population.
- ↑ The title of philosopher as used in Franklin’s lifetime referred neither in England nor in France to him as author of moral maxims, but to him as a scientist—a “natural philosopher.”
