,
and made the Protestant Swiss, Necker,[2] her Comptroller-general. It is
a little woful, that we are relapsing into the nonsense the rest of
Europe is shaking off! and it is more deplorable, as we know by repeated
experience, that this country has always been disgraced by Tory
administrations. The rubric is the only gainer by them in a few martyrs.

[Footnote 1: Dr. Franklin, as a man of science, may almost be called the
father of electrical science. He was the discoverer of the electrical
character of lightning, a discovery which he followed up by the
invention of iron conductors for the protection of buildings, &c., from
lightning. He was also a very zealous politician, and one of the leaders
of the American colonists in their resistance to the taxation imposed
first by Mr. Grenville and afterwards by Mr. C. Townshend. He resided
for several years in England as agent for the State of Pennsylvania, and
in that character, in the year 1765, was examined before the Committee
of the House of Commons on the Stamp Act of Mr. Grenville. After the
civil war broke out he was elected a member of the American Congress,
and was sent as an envoy to France to negotiate a treaty with that
country. As early as 1758 he was elected a member of the Royal Society
in England, and received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from the
University of Oxford.]

[Footnote 2: Necker was originally a banker, in which business he made a
large fortune; but after a time he turned his attention to politics. He
began by opposing the financial and constitutional schemes of the great
Turgot, and shortly after the dismissal of that Minister he himself was
admitted into the Ministry as a sort of Secretary to the Treasury, his
religion, as a Protestant, being a bar to his receiving the title of
"Comptroller-General," though, in fact, he had the entire management of
the finance of the kingdom, which, by artful misrepresentation of his
measures and suppression of such important facts, that he had contracted
loans to the amount of twenty millions of money, he represented as far
more flourishing than in reality it was. At the end of two or three
years he resigned his office in discontent at his services not receiving
the rewards to which he considered himself entitled. But in 1788 he was
again placed in office, on this occasion as Comptroller-General, and,
practically, Prime Minister, a post for which he was utterly unfit; for
he had not one qualification for a st