ry clubs: in the cafe where the members met, his bust was
crowned with oak-leaves, and on the pedestal below was engraved the
single word VIR. This simple encomium, calling to mind Napoleon's _This
is a man_ after meeting Goethe, sums up better than a volume of eulogy
what Franklin was in his own day and what his life may still signify to
us. He acted at one time as a commander of troops, yet cannot be called
a soldier; he was a great statesman, yet not among the greatest; he
made famous discoveries in science, yet was scarcely a professional
scientist; he was lauded as a philosopher, yet barely outstepped the
region of common sense; he wrote ever as a moralist, yet in some
respects lived a free life; he is one of the few great American
authors, yet never published a book; he was a shrewd economist, yet
left at his death only a moderate fortune; he accomplished much as a
philanthropist, yet never sacrificed his own weal. Above all and in all
things he was a man, able to cope with every chance of life and wring
profit out of it; he had perhaps the alertest mind of any man of that
alert century. In his shrewdness, versatility, self-reliance, wit, as
also in his lack of the deeper reverence and imagination, he, I think,
more than any other man who has yet lived, represents the full American
character. And so in studying his life, though at times we may wish
that to his practical intelligence were added the fervid insight of
Jonathan Edwards, who was his only intellectual equal in the colonies,
or the serene faith of an Emerson, who was born "within a kite string's
distance" of his birthplace in Boston, yet in the end we are borne away
by the wonderful openness and rectitude of his mind, and are willing to
grant him his high representative position.

Franklin's ancestors were of the sturdy sort that have made the
strength of the Anglo-Saxon race. For three hundred years at least his
family had lived on a freehold of thirty acres in the village of Ecton,
Northamptonshire; and for many generations father and son had been
smiths. Parton, in his capital Life of Franklin, has observed that
Washington's ancestors lived in the same county, although much higher
in the social scale; and it may well have been that more than one of
Franklin's ancestors "tightened a rivet in the armor or replaced a shoe
upon the horse of a Washington, or doffed his cap to a Washington
riding past the ancestral forge." During these long years the family