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I well remember how when first I read that, I drew a deep breath of relief, and said to myself: "After all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's victorious good sense!" So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern society, and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology.
A young man was taken to Franklin's garden at Passy, and when it was announced to him that Deslon, who had taken him there, had magnetized a tree, this young man ran about the garden, and fell down in convulsions, but it was not under the magnetized tree: the crisis seized him while he was embracing another tree, very far from the former.
They struggled along the west coast of King William Land, but failed to reach their destination; disease, and even starvation, gradually lessened their numbers. An old Eskimo woman, who had watched the melancholy procession, afterwards told M'Clintock they fell down and died as they walked. By this time considerable anxiety had been roused by the absence of any news from Franklin's party.
The very elaborateness and vehemence of the exculpations put forth by American writers indicate a lurking feeling that the opposite side is at least plausible. I add my opinion decidedly upon Franklin's side, though I certainly see force in the contrary view.
The remark excited Franklin's indignation, and he says: "I told him I was so strongly impressed with the kind assistance afforded us by France in our distress, and the generous and noble manner in which it was granted, without extracting or stipulating for a single privilege or particular advantage to herself in our commerce, or otherwise, that I could never suffer myself to think of such reasonings for lessening the obligation, and I hoped, and indeed did not doubt, but my countrymen were all of the same sentiments."
Franklin's father had felt, through life, the disadvantages of a defective education; although, in his peculiar sphere of action, it might be doubted whether he did not gain more than he lost, by being thrown on his own resources, and compelled to study men and their actual affairs, rather than books.
"There is that residence," he said to his companions, "which James Ross himself called the Camp of Refuge; if Franklin's expedition had reached this spot, it would have been saved. There is the engine which was abandoned here, and the stove at which the crew of the Prince Albert warmed themselves in 1851.
He had an immense respect for the dignity of America; he was perhaps fortunately saved from disillusionment by his distance from home. But be this as it may, the way in which he felt and therefore genuinely talked about his nation and his country was not without its moral effect in Europe. Intellectually there are few men who are Franklin's peers in all the ages and nations.
He covered, and covered well, vast ground. The reputation of doing and knowing various unrelated things is wont to bring suspicion of perfunctoriness; but the ideal of the human intellect is an understanding to which all knowledge and all activity are germane. There have been a few, very few minds which have approximated toward this ideal, and among them Franklin's is prominent.
When Benjamin Franklin walked down the streets of Philadelphia, carrying a book under his arm, and munching a crust of bread, just one person observed him, a rosy maiden, who laughed merrily at him. As our old school readers narrated, with naïve surprise, this maiden was destined to become Franklin's faithful wife. And yet psychology should have led us to expect such a result.
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