d thoughts engrossed. In all his voluminous
writings we find no allusion to those tremendous wrongs, which Louis
XIV. and Louis XV. had entailed upon the people,--wrongs which soon
convulsed society with the volcanic throes of the French revolution.

Jefferson, who succeeded Franklin, was cast in a different mould. He
saw and fully comprehended the misery under which the millions of the
French peasantry were groaning. And this led him to the conviction,
that no people could be safe, unless the government were placed in
their own hands.

Still Franklin, like his brother deists, Hume and Voltaire, seeing how
impotent were all the motives they could urge to make man virtuous,
became thoroughly disgusted with human nature. He even went beyond
Paul in his description of the hopeless depravity of man. The idea of
reclaiming him by his philosophy was abandoned entirely. And yet he
was not prepared to embrace that gospel, which the experience of ages
has proved to be the "wisdom of God and the power of God unto
salvation."

"He enlarges," writes Mr. Parton, "upon this theme, in his most
delightful manner, in another letter to Dr. Priestley." In this letter
he says in his usual jocular strain, that the more he studies the
moral part of nature the more he is disgusted; that he finds men very
badly constructed; that they are more prone to do evil than to do
good; that they take great pleasure in killing one another, and that
he doubts whether the species is worth preserving. He intimates that
every attempt to save their souls is "an idle amusement."

"As you grow older," he writes, "you may perhaps repent of having
murdered, in mephitic air, so many honest, harmless mice, and wish
that, to prevent mischief, you had used boys and girls instead of
them."

In this singular letter he represents a young angel having been sent
to this world, under the guidance of an old courier spirit. They
arrive over the seas of Martinico, in the midst of the horrible fight
between the fleets of Rodney and De Grasse.

"When," he writes, "through the clouds of smoke, he (the young angel)
saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with mangled limbs and
bodies, dead or dying; the ships sinking, burning, or blown into the
air; and the quantity of pain, misery and destruction the crews, yet
alive, were with so much eagerness dealing round to one another, he
turned angrily to his guide and said,

"'You blundering blockhead; you are ignorant of yo