ritish Cabinet. He never had dreamed that he was to look either above
them to the King, or behind them to any unknown instigators of their
mischief. With perfect good faith on his own part, he gave them the
benefit of their own supposed ignorance, wrong-headedness, wilfulness,
and ingenuity, such as it was, in inventing irritating and oppressive
measures which, he warned them, would inevitably alienate the hearts and
the allegiance of the Colonists. He records, that, while he had never
had a thought but such as this imagined state of the facts had favored,
a Liberal member of Parliament, an intimate friend of his, coming to
him for a private interview, had told him that the Ministry were not the
prime movers in this mischief, but were instigated to it by parties whom
Franklin little suspected of such an agency. When the Doctor expressed
his incredulity, the friend promised to give him decisive evidence of
the full truth of his assertion. It came to Franklin in a form which
astounded him, while it opened his eyes and fixed his indignation upon a
class of men who from that moment onward were to him the exponents of
all malignity and baseness. The evidence came in the shape of the
originals, the autographs, of the above-named letters, written by
natives of the American soil, office-holders under the Crown, who, while
pampered and trusted by their constituents on this side of the water,
were actually dictating, advising, and inspiriting the measures of the
British Ministry most hateful to the Colonists. Franklin never overcame
the impression from that shock. When he was negotiating the treaty of
peace, he set his face and heart most resolutely against all the efforts
and propositions made by the representatives of the Crown to secure to
the Tories redress or compensation. He insisted that Britain, in
espousing their alleged wrongs, indicated that she herself ought to
remunerate their losses; that they, in fact, had been her agents and
instruments, as truly as were her Crown officials and troops. Their
malignant hostility toward their fellow-Colonists, and the sufferings
and losses entailed on America by their open assertion of the rights of
the Crown, and by the direct or indirect help which oppressive measures
had received from them, had deprived them of all claim even on the pity
of those who had triumphed in spite of them. At any rate, Franklin
insisted, and it was the utmost to which he would assent,--his irony and
sarcas