The True Benjamin Franklin

He liked it so well that he bought the rest of Bunyan’s works, but soon sold them to procure Burton’s Historical Collections, which were forty small chapmen’s books, full of travels, adventures, history, and descriptions of animals, well calculated to stimulate the interest of a bright lad. Among his father’s theological books was Plutarch’s “Lives,” which young Franklin read eagerly, also De Foe’s “Essay upon Projects,” and Cotton Mather’s “Essays to do Good,” which he said had an important influence on his character.

He so hated cutting wicks and melting tallow that, like many other boys of his time, he wanted to run away to sea; and his father, to check this inclination and settle him, compelled him to sign articles of apprenticeship with his brother James, who was a printer. The child’s taste for books, the father thought, fitted him to be a printer, which would be a more profitable occupation than the ministry, for which he was at first intended.

So Franklin was bound by law to serve his brother until he was twenty-one. He learned the business quickly, stealing time to read books, which he sometimes persuaded booksellers’ apprentices to take from their masters’ shops in the evening. He would sit up nearly all night to read them, so that they might be returned early in the morning before they were missed.

He wrote ballads, like his uncle Benjamin and his grandfather Peter Folger, on popular events, – the drowning of a Captain Worthilake, and the pirate Blackbeard, – and, after his brother had printed them, sold them in the streets. His biographer, Weems, quotes one of these verses, which he declares he had seen and remembered, and I give it with the qualification that it comes from Weems:

“Come all you jolly sailors,
You all, so stout and brave;
Come hearken and I’ll tell you
What happened on the wave.

“Oh! ’tis of that bloody Blackbeard
I’m going now for to tell;
And as how by gallant Maynard
He soon was sent to hell —
With a down, down, down, derry down.”

His father ridiculed these verses, in spite of their successful sale, and dissuaded him from any more attempts; but Franklin remained more or less of a verse-writer to the end of his life. Verse-writing trained him to write good prose, and this accomplishment contributed, he thought, more than anything else to his advancement.

He had an intimate friend, John Collins, likewise inclined to books, and the two argued and disputed with each other. Franklin was fond of wordy contention at that time, and it was possibly a good mental training for him. He had caught it, he says, from reading his father’s books of religious controversy. But in after-years he became convinced that this disputatious turn was a very bad habit, which made one extremely disagreeable and alienated friends; he therefore adopted during most of his life a method of cautious modesty.

He once disputed with Collins on the propriety of educating women and on their ability for study. He took the side of the women, and, feeling himself worsted by Collins, who had a more fluent tongue, he reduced his arguments to writing and sent them to him. A correspondence followed, and Franklin’s father, happening to find the papers, pointed out to his son the great advantage Collins had in clearness and elegance of expression. A hint is all that genius requires, and Franklin went resolutely to work to improve himself.

“About this time I met with an odd volume of the Spectator. It was the third. I had never before seen any of them. I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. But I found I wanted a stock of words, or a readiness in recollecting and using them, which I thought I should have acquired before that time if I had gone on making verses; since the continual occasion for words of the same import, but of different length, to suit the measure, or of different sound for the rhyme, would have laid me under a constant necessity of searching for variety, and also have tended to fix that variety in my mind, and make me master of it. Therefore I took some of the tales and turned them into verse; and, after a time, when I had pretty well forgotten the prose, turned them back again. I also sometimes jumbled my collections of hints into confusion, and after some weeks endeavored to reduce them into the best order, before I began to form the full sentences and compleat the paper. This was to teach me method in the arrangement of thoughts. By comparing my work afterwards with the original, I discovered many faults and amended them; but I sometimes had the pleasure of fancying that, in certain particulars of small import, I had been lucky enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think I might possibly in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.”

In some respects this is the most interesting passage in all of Franklin’s writings. It was this severe training of himself which gave him that wonderful facility in the use of English that made him a great man. Without it he would have been second-rate or ordinary. His method of improving his style served also as a discipline in thought and logic such as is seldom, if ever, given nowadays in any school or college.

Many of those who have reflected deeply on the subject of college education have declared that its ultimate object should be to give in the highest degree the power of expression. Some have said that a sense of honor and the power of expression should be its objects. But there are few who will dispute the proposition that a collegian who receives his diploma without receiving with it more of the art of expression than most men possess has spent his time and his money in vain.

During the last thirty years we have been trying every conceivable experiment in college education, many of them mere imitations from abroad and many of them mere suggestions, suppositions, or Utopian theories. When we began these experiments it was taken for granted that the old methods, which had produced in this country such scholars, writers, and thinkers as Lowell, Longfellow, Holmes, Hawthorne, Webster, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, Everett, Phillips, Channing, Parker, and Parkman, and in England a host too numerous to name, must necessarily be wrong. We began to imitate Germany. It was assumed that if we transplanted the German system we should begin to grind out Mommsens and Bunsens by the yard, like a cotton-mill; and that if we added to the German system every plausible suggestion of our own for making things easy, the result would be a stupendous success.

But how many men have we produced who can be compared with the men of the old system? Not one. The experiment, except so far as it has given a large number of people a great deal of pretty information about history and the fine arts, is a vast failure. After thirty years of effort we have just discovered that the boys whose nerves and eyesight are being worn out under our wonderful system cannot write a decent letter in the English language; and a committee of Harvard University have spent months of labor and issued a voluminous report of hundreds of pages on this mortifying discovery, leaving it as perplexing and humiliating as they found it.

Remedies are proposed. We have made a mistake, say some, and they suggest that for a change we adopt the English University system. After partially abolishing Latin and Greek we were to have in place of them a great deal of history and mathematics, which were more practical, it was said; but now we are informed that this also was a mistake, and a movement is on foot to abolish history and algebra. Others suggest the French system, and one individual writes a long article for the newspapers proving beyond the possibility of a doubt that French education is just the thing we need. Always imitating something; always trying to bring in the foreign and distant. And until we stop this vulgar provincial snobbery and believe in ourselves and learn to do our own work with our own people in our own way, we shall continue to flounder and fail.

Let us distinguish clearly between information and education. If it is necessary, especially in these times, to give people information on various subjects, – on science, history, art, bric-a-brac, or mud pies, – very good; let it be done by all means, for it seems to have a refining influence on the masses. But do not call it education. Education is teaching a person to do something with his mind or his muscles or with both. It involves training, discipline, drill; things which, as a rule, are very unpleasant to young people, and which, unless they are geniuses, like Franklin, they will not take up of their own accord.

You can never teach a boy to write good English by having him read elegant extracts from distinguished authors, or by making him wade through endless text-books of anatomy, physics, botany, history, and philosophy, or by giving him a glib knowledge of French or German, or by perfunctory translations of Latin and Greek prepared in the new-fashioned, easy way, without a grammar.

The old English method, by which boys were compelled to write Latin verses, was simply another form of Franklin’s method, but rather more severe in some respects, because the boy was compelled to discipline his versifying power and hunt for and use words in two languages at once. The result was some of the greatest masters of language that the world has ever known, and the ordinary boy, though perhaps not a wonder in all the sciences, did not have a learned committee of a university investigating his disgraceful failure to use his native tongue. His mind, moreover, had been so disciplined by the severe training in the use of language – which is only another name for thought – that he was capable of taking up and mastering with ease any subject in science or philosophy, and could make as good mud pies and judge as well of bric-a-brac as those who had never done anything else.

In this country people object to compelling boys to write verse, because, as they say, it is an endeavor to force them to become poets whether they have talent for it or not. Any one who reflects, however, knows that there is no question of poetry in the matter. It is merely a question of technical versifying and use of language. Franklin never wrote a line of poetry in his life, but he wrote hundreds of lines of verse, to the great improvement of the faculty which made him the man he was.

When he voluntarily subjected himself to a mental discipline which modern parents would consider cruel he was only fifteen years old; certainly a rather unusual precocity, from which some people would prophesy a dwarfed career or an early death. But he did some of his best work after he was eighty, and died at the age of eighty-four.

He lived in the little village of Boston nearly two hundred years ago, the wholesome wilderness on one side of him and the wholesome ocean on the other. He worked with his strong arms and hands all day, and the mental discipline and reading were stolen sweets at the dinner-hour, at night, and on Sunday, – for he neglected church-going for the sake of his studies. Could he have budded and grown amid our distraction, dust, and disquietude? and have we any more of the elements of happiness than he?

Ashamed of his failure to learn arithmetic during his two short years at school, he procured a book on the subject and studied it by himself. In the same way he studied navigation and a little geometry. When scarcely seventeen he read Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding” and “The Art of Thinking,” by Messieurs du Port-Royal.

“While I was intent on improving my language I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s) at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procured Xenophon’s memorable things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charmed with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter.”

It was very shrewd of the boy to see so quickly the strategic advantage of the humbler method. It was also significant of genius that he should of his own accord not only train and discipline himself, but feed his mind on the great masters of literature instead of on trash. He could hardly have done any better at school, for he was gifted with unusual power of self-education. Boys are occasionally met with who have by their own efforts acquired a sufficient education to obtain a good livelihood or even to become rich; but it would be difficult to find another instance of a boy with only two years’ schooling self-educating himself up to the ability not only of making a fortune, but of becoming a man of letters, a man of science, a philosopher, a diplomat, and a statesman of such very distinguished rank.

There was no danger of his inclination for the higher departments of learning making him visionary or impractical, as is so often the case with the modern collegian. He was of necessity always in close contact with actual life. His brother, in whose printing-office he worked as an apprentice, was continually beating him; perhaps not without reason, for Franklin himself admits that he was rather saucy and provoking. He was, it seems, at this period not a little vain of his learning and his skill as a workman. He had been writing important articles for his brother’s newspaper, and he thought that his brother failed to appreciate his importance. They soon quarrelled, and Franklin ran away to New York.

He went secretly on board a sloop at Boston, having sold some of his books to raise the passage-money; and after a three days’ voyage, which completely cured his desire for the sea, he found himself in a strange town, several hundred miles from home. He applied for work to old Mr. William Bradford, the famous printer of the colonies, who had recently removed from Philadelphia. But he had no position to give the boy, and recommended him to go to Philadelphia, where his son kept a printing-office and needed a hand.

Franklin started for Amboy, New Jersey, in a sloop; but in crossing the bay they were struck by a squall, which tore their rotten sails to pieces and drove them on Long Island. They saved themselves from wreck on the beach by anchoring just in time, and lay thus the rest of the day and the following night, soaked to the skin and without food or sleep. They reached Amboy the next day, having had nothing to eat for thirty hours, and in the evening Franklin found himself in a fever.

He had heard that drinking plentifully of cold water was a good remedy; so he tried it, went to bed, and woke up well the next morning. But it was probably his boyish elasticity that cured him, and not the cold water, as he would have us believe.

He started on foot for Burlington, a distance of fifty miles, and tramped till noon through a hard rain, when he halted at an inn, and wished that he had never left home. He was a sorry figure, and people began to suspect him to be a runaway servant, which in truth he was. But the next day he got within eight miles of Burlington, and stopped at a tavern kept by a Dr. Brown, an eccentric man, who, finding that the boy had read serious books, was very friendly with him, and the two continued their acquaintance as long as the tavern-keeper lived.

Reaching Burlington on Saturday, he lodged with an old woman, who sold him some gingerbread and gave him a dinner of ox-cheek, to which he added a pot of ale. His intention had been to stay until the following Tuesday, but he found a boat going down the river that evening, which brought him to Philadelphia on Sunday morning.

He walked up Market Street from the wharf, dirty, his pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings, and carrying three great puffy rolls, one under each arm and eating the third. Passing by the house of a Mrs. Read, her daughter, standing at the door, saw the ridiculous, awkward-looking boy, and was much amused. But he continued strolling along the streets, eating his roll and calmly surveying the town where he was to become so eminent. One roll was enough for his appetite, and the other two, with a boy’s sincere generosity, he gave to a woman and her child. He had insisted on paying for his passage, although the boatman was willing to let him off because he had assisted to row. A man, Franklin sagely remarks, is sometimes more generous when he has but little money through fear of being thought to have but little.

He wandered into a Quaker meeting-house and, as it was a silent meeting, fell fast asleep. Aroused by some one when the meeting broke up, he sought the river again, and was shown the Crooked Billet Inn, where he spent the afternoon sleeping, and immediately after supper went sound asleep again, and never woke till morning.

The next day he succeeded in obtaining work with a printer named Keimer, a man who had been a religious fanatic and was a good deal of a knave; and this Keimer obtained lodging for him at the house of Mrs. Read, whose daughter had seen him walking up Market Street eating his roll. Well lodged, at work, and with a little money to spend, he lived agreeably, he tells us, in Philadelphia, made the acquaintance of young men who were fond of reading, and very soon his brother-in-law, Robert Holmes, master of a sloop that traded between Boston and the Delaware River, heard that the runaway was in Philadelphia.

Holmes wrote from New Castle, Delaware, to the boy, assuring him of the regret of his family at his absconding, of their continued good will, and urging him to return. Franklin replied, giving his side of the story, and Holmes showed the letter to Sir William Keith, Governor of Pennsylvania and Delaware, who happened to be at New Castle.

Keith was one of the most popular colonial governors that Pennsylvania ever had, and enjoyed a successful administration of ten years, which might have lasted much longer but for his reckless ambition. He had allowed himself to fall into habits of extravagance and debt, and had a way of building up his popularity by making profuse promises, most of which he could not keep. Chicanery finally became an habitual vice which he was totally unable to restrain, and he would indulge in it without the slightest reason or excuse.

He was surprised at the ability shown in Franklin’s letter, declared that he must be set up in the printing business in Philadelphia, where a good printer was sadly needed, and promised to procure for him the public printing. A few days afterwards Franklin and Keimer, working near the window, were very much surprised to see the governor and Colonel French, of New Castle, dressed in all the finery of the time, walking across the street to their shop. Keimer thought that the visit was to him, and “stared like a poisoned pig,” Franklin tells us, when he saw the governor addressing his workman with all the blandishments of courtly flattery. “Why,” exclaimed the unscrupulous Keith, “did you not come to me immediately on your arrival in the town? It was unkind not to do so.” He insisted that the boy should accompany him to the tavern, where he and Colonel French were going to try some excellent Madeira.

At the tavern the boy’s future life was laid out for him. The governor and Colonel French would give him the public printing of both Pennsylvania and Delaware. Meantime he was to go back to Boston, see his father, and procure his assistance in starting in business. The father would not refuse, for Sir William would write him a letter which would put everything right. So Franklin, completely deceived, agreed, and, until a ship could be found that was going to Boston, he dined occasionally with the governor, and became very much inflated with a sense of his own importance.

Arrived at Boston, he strolled into his brother’s printing-office, dressed in beautiful clothes, with a watch, and jingling five pounds sterling in silver in his pockets. He drew out a handful of the silver and spread it before the workmen, to their great surprise, for at that time Massachusetts was afflicted with a paper currency. Then, with consummate impudence and in his brother’s presence, he gave the men a piece of eight to buy drink, and, after telling them what a good place Philadelphia was, swaggered out of the shop. It is not surprising that his brother turned away from him and refused to forgive or forget his conduct.

His father, being a man of sense, flatly refused to furnish money to start a boy of eighteen in an expensive business, and was curious to know what sort of man Governor Keith was, to recommend such a thing. So Franklin, with his conceit only slightly reduced, returned to Philadelphia, but this time with the blessing and consent of his parents.

He stopped in Rhode Island on his way, to visit his brother John, who had quite an affection for him, and while there was asked by a Mr. Vernon to collect thirty-five pounds due him in Pennsylvania, and was given an order for the money. On the vessel from Newport to New York were two women of the town, with whom Franklin, in his ignorance of the world, talked familiarly, until warned by a matronly Quaker lady. When the vessel reached New York, the women robbed the captain and were arrested.

His education in worldly matters was now to begin in earnest. His friend Collins accompanied him to Philadelphia; but Collins had taken to drink and gambling, and from this time on was continually borrowing money of Franklin. The Governor of New York, son of the famous Bishop Burnet, hearing from the captain that a plain young man who was fond of books had arrived, sent for him, flattered him, and added to his increasing conceit. The boy who within a year had been made so much of by two governors was on the brink of ruin.

On his journey to Philadelphia he collected the money due Mr. Vernon, and used part of it to pay the expenses of Collins and himself. Collins kept borrowing Mr. Vernon’s money from him, and Franklin was soon in the position of an embezzler.

Governor Keith laughed at the prudence of his father in refusing to set up in business such a promising young man. “I will do it myself,” he said. “Give me an inventory of the things necessary to be had from England, and I will send for them. You shall repay me when you are able.”

Thinking him the best man that had ever lived, Franklin brought him the inventory.

“But now,” said Keith, “if you were on the spot in England to choose the types and see that everything was good, might not that be of some advantage? And then you may make acquaintances there and establish correspondences in the bookselling and stationery way.”

Of course that was delightful.