between France and the United States by acknowledging American independence. Richmond still hoped to avoid a war. Lord Shelburne dwelt on the greatness of the affront offered by France and the impossibility of not resenting it, yet he would not listen to a private overture from the ministers. "Without Lord Chatham," he said, "any new arrangement would be inefficient; with Lord Chatham, nothing could be done but by an entire new cabinet and a change in the chief departments of the law." On the report of this language, the king wrote his last word to Lord North: "Rather than be shackled by these desperate men, I will see any form of government introduced into this island, and lose my crown rather than wear it as a disgrace."

The twentieth of March was the day appointed for the presentation of the American commissioners to the king of France in the palace built by Louis XIV. at Versailles. The world thought only of Franklin; but he was accompanied by his two colleagues and by the unreceived ministers to Prussia and Tuscany. These four glittered in lace and powder; the patriarch was dressed in the plain gala coat of Manchester velvet which he had used at the levee of George III.—the same which, according to the custom of that age, he had worn, as it proved, for the last time in England, when as agent of Massachusetts he had appeared before the privy council-with white stockings, spectacles on his nose, a round white hat under his arm, and his thin gray hair in its natural state. The crowd through which they passed received them with long-continued applause. The king, without any unusual courtesy, said to them: "I wish congress to be assured of my friendship." After the ceremony they paid a visit to the wife of Lafayette, and dined with the secretary of foreign affairs. Two days later they were introduced to the still youthful Marie Antoinette, who yielded willingly to generous impulses in behalf of republicans, and by her sympathy made the support of America a fashion at the French court. The king felt all the while as if he were wronging the cause of monarchy itself by his acknowledgment of rebel republicans, and engaged in the American revolution against his own will, only because members of his cabinet insisted that it was his duty to France to take revenge on Eng

land. Personally he was irritated, and did not disguise his vexation. The praises lavished on Franklin by those around the queen fretted him to peevishness, and he mocked what seemed to him the pretentious enthusiasm of the Countess Diana de Polignac.

The pique of the king was in no degree due to any defect in Franklin. He was a man of the soundest understanding, never disturbed by recollections or fears, by capricious anxieties, or the susceptibilities of self-love. Free from the illusions of poetic natures, he loved truth for its own sake and saw things as they were. As a consequence, he had no eloquence but that of clearness. He knew the moral world to be subjected to laws like the natural world; in conducting affairs he remembered the necessary relation of cause to effect, aiming only at what was possible; and with a tranquil mind he signed the treaty with France, just as with calm observation he had contemplated the dangers of his country. In regard to money he was frugal, that he might be independent and that he might be generous. He owed good health to his exemplary temperance. Habitually gay, employment was his resource against weariness and sorrow; and contentment came from his superiority to ambition, interest, or vanity. There was about him more of moral greatness than appeared on the surface; and, while he made no boast of unselfish benevolence, he would have surely met martyrdom had duty demanded it.

The official conduct of Franklin and his intercourse with persons of highest rank were marked by the most delicate propriety as well as by self-respect. His charm was simplicity, which gave grace to his style and ease to his manners. No life-long courtier could have been more free from vulgarity; no diplomatist more true to his position as minister of a republic; no laborer more consistent with his former life as a workingman; and thus he won respect and favor from all. When a celebrated cause was to be heard before the parliament of Paris, the throng which filled the house and its approaches opened a way on his appearance, and he passed to the seat reserved for him amid the acclamations of the people. At the opera, at the theatres, similar honors were paid him. It is John Adams who said: "Not Leibnitz or Newton, not Fred

eric or Voltaire, had a more universal reputation; and his character was more beloved and esteemed than that of them all." Throughout Europe there was scarcely a citizen or a peasant of any culture who was not familiar with his name, and who did not consider him as a friend to all men. At the academy, Alembert addressed him as one who had wrenched the thunderbolt from the cloud, the sceptre from tyrants; and both these ideas were of a nature to pass easily into the common mind. From the part which he had taken in the emancipation of America, imagination transfigured him as the man who had separated the colonies from Great Britain, had framed their best constitutions of government, and by counsel and example would show how to abolish all political evil throughout the world. Malesherbes spoke of the excellence of the institutions that permitted a printer, the son of a tallow-chandler, to act a great part in public affairs; and, if Malesherbes reasoned so, how much more the workmen of Paris and the people. Thus Franklin was the venerable impersonation of democracy, so calmly decorous, so free from a disposition to quarrel with the convictions of others, that, while he was the delight of free-thinking philosophers, he escaped the hatred of the clergy, and his presence excited no jealousy in the old nobility. He remarked to those in Paris who learned of him the secret of statesmanship: "He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world;" and we know from Condorcet that he said in a public company: "You perceive Liberty establish herself and flourish almost under your eyes; I dare to predict that by and by you will be anxious to taste her blessings." In this way he conciliated the most opposite natures, yet not for himself. Whatever favor he met in society, whatever honor he received from the academy, whatever authority he gained as a man of science, whatever distinction came to him through the good will of the people, whatever fame he acquired throughout Europe, he turned to account for the good of his country. Surrounded by colleagues, some of whom were jealous of his superiority, and for no service whatever were greedy of the public money, he threw their angry demands into the fire. Arthur Lee intrigued to supplant him, Izard ma

ligned him with the strangeness of passionate frenzy; but he met their hostility by patient indifference. Never detracting from the merit of any one, he did not disdain glory, and he knew how to pardon envy. Great as were the injuries which he received in England, he used toward that power undeviating frankness and fairness.

In England, Rockingham, Richmond, Burke, Fox, and Conway desired to meet the offers of Franklin. So, too, did Lord North, though he was too selfish to be true to his convictions. On the other side stood the king; but, for reasons which were hateful to the king, Chatham arrayed himself with inflexibility against American independence. Richmond, as a friend to liberty, made advances to Chatham, sending him the draft of an address which he was to move in the house of lords, and entreating of him mutual confidence and support. Chatham rejected the overture, and avowed the purpose of opposing the motion. Accordingly, on the seventh of April, against earnest requests, Lord Chatham, wrapped up in flannel to the knees, pale and wasted away, his eyes still retaining their fire, came into the house of lords, leaning upon his son William Pitt and his son-in-law Lord Mahon. The peers stood up out of respect as he hobbled to his bench. The duke of Richmond proposed and spoke elaborately in favor of an address to the king, which in substance recommended the recognition of the independent sovereignty of the thirteen revolted provinces and a change of administration. Chatham, who alone of British statesmen had a right to invite America to resume her old connection, rose from his seat with slowness and difficulty, leaning on his crutches and supported under each arm by a friend. He seemed a being superior to those around him. Raising one hand from his crutch, and casting his eyes toward heaven, he said: "I thank God that, old and infirm, and with more than one foot in the grave, I have been able to come this day to stand up in the cause of my country, perhaps never again to enter the walls of this house." Stillness prevailed. His voice, at first low and feeble, rose and became harmonious; but his speech faltered, his sentences were broken, his words were no more than flashes through darkness, shreds of sublime but unconnected eloquence. He

recalled his prophecies of the evils which were to follow such American measures as had been adopted, adding at the end of each: "and so it proved." He could not act with Lord Rockingham and his friends, because they persisted in unretracted error. He laughed to scorn the idea of an invasion of England by Spain or by France or by both. "If peace cannot be preserved with honor, why is not war declared without hesitation? This kingdom has still resources to maintain its just rights. Any state is better than despair. My lords, I rejoice that the grave has not closed upon me, that I am still alive to lift up my voice against the dismemberment of this ancient and most noble monarchy." The duke of Richmond answered with respect for the name of Chatham, so dear to Englishmen, but he resolutely maintained the wisdom of avoiding a war in which France and Spain would have America for their ally. Lord Chatham would have replied; but, after two or three unsuc cessful efforts to rise, he fell backward and seemed in the agonies of death. Every one of the peers pressed round him, save Mansfield, who sat unmoved. The senseless sufferer was borne from the house with tender solicitude to the bed from which he never was to rise.

The king wrote at once to Lord North: "May not the political exit of Lord Chatham incline you to continue at the head of my affairs?" The world was saddened by the loss of so great a man. The elder Pitt never seemed more thoroughly the spokesman of the people of England than in the last months of his career. He came to parliament with an all-impassioned love of liberty, the proudest sentiment of nationality, his old scorn for the house of Bourbon, and a burning passion for recovering the American colonies by reviving and establishing their rights. His eloquence in the early part of the session seemed to some of his hearers to surpass all that they had heard of the orators of Greece or Rome. In his last days he was still hoping for a free England and a house of commons truly representing the British people. With a haughtiness all the more marvellous from his age, decrepitude, and insulation, he confronted alone all branches of the nobility, who had lost a continent in the vain hope of saving themselves a shilling in the pound of the land-tax, and declared that there