The Project Gutenberg EBook of Benjamin Franklin, by John Torrey Morse, Jr.

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Title: Benjamin Franklin

Author: John Torrey Morse, Jr.

Release Date: May 7, 2007 [EBook #21348]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ***

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[Illustration: Benj. Franklin]

American Statesmen

Standard Library Edition

[Illustration: _Independence Hall, Philadelphia, 1776_]

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

BY

JOHN T. MORSE, JR.

[Illustration]

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1899

Copyright, 1898,

BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.

_All rights reserved._

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

The editor has often been asked: "Upon what principle have you
constructed this series of lives of American statesmen?" The query has
always been civil in form, while in substance it has often implied that
the "principle," as to which inquiry is made, has been undiscoverable by
the interrogator. Other queries, like pendants, have also come: Why have
you not included A, or B, or C? The inference from these is that the
querist conceives A, or B, or C to be statesmen certainly not less
eminent than E, or F, or G, whose names he sees upon the list. Now there
really has been a principle of selection; but it has not been a
mathematical principle, whereby the several statesmen of the country
have been brought to the measuring-pole, like horses, and those of a
certain height have been accepted, and those not seeming to reach that
height have been rejected. The principle has been to make such a list of
men in public life that the aggregation of all their biographies would
give, in this personal shape, the history and the picture of the growth
and development of the United States from the beginning of that
agitation which led to the Revolution until the completion of that
solidarity which we believe has resulted from the civil war and the
subsequent reconstruction.

In illustration, let me speak of a few volumes. Patrick Henry was hardly
a great