parent of all public libraries in
America. He also organized and equipped a fire-company; paved and lighted
the streets of Philadelphia; established a high school and an academy for
the study of English branches; founded the Philadelphia Public Hospital;
invented the toggle-joint printing-press, the Franklin Stove, and various
other useful mechanical devices.

After his retirement from business, Franklin enjoyed seven years of what
he called leisure, but they were years of study and application; years of
happiness and sweet content, but years of aspiration and an earnest
looking into the future. His experiments with kite and key had made his
name known in all the scientific circles of Europe, and his suggestive
writings on the subject of electricity had caused Goethe to lay down his
pen and go to rubbing amber for the edification of all Weimar.

Franklin was in correspondence with the greatest minds of Europe, and what
his "Poor Richard Almanac" had done for the plain people of America, his
pamphlets were now doing for the philosophers of the Old World.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-four, he wrote a treatise showing the Colonies
that they must be united, and this was the first public word that was to
grow and crystallize and become the United States of America. Before
that, the Colonies were simply single, independent, jealous and bickering
overgrown clans. Franklin showed for the first time that they must unite
in mutual aims.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-seven, matters were getting a little strained
between the Province of Pennsylvania and England. "The lawmakers of
England do not understand us--some one should go there as an authorized
agent to plead our cause," and Franklin was at once chosen as the man of
strongest personality and soundest sense. So Franklin went to England and
remained there for five years as agent for the Colonies.

He then returned home, but after two years the Stamp Act had stirred up
the public temper to a degree that made revolution imminent, and Franklin
again went to England to plead for justice. The record of the ten years he
now spent in London is told by Bancroft in a hundred pages. Bancroft is
very good, and! have no desire to rival him, so suffice it to say that
Franklin did all that any man could have done to avert the coming War of
the Revolution. Burke has said that when he appeared before Parliament to
be examined as to the condition of things in America, it was like a lot of
scho