The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1. Бенджамин Франклин

      It is certainly a little remarkable,

      1st, that so large a portion of the available space of a very obscure Paris newspaper, devoted mainly to European affairs “of those momentous times,” should be given to a New York criticism of an English book; a criticism written in September, 1806, and which by March, 1807, had certainly lost much of whatever novelty it may have once possessed.

      2d. That William Temple Franklin, instead of presenting this defence in one of the two countries where the charges had been circulated and were most damaging to his character, should have preferred an organ not one note of which was likely to reach England or America, or any considerable number of readers in France.

      3d. That in this letter, while stoutly denying any collusion with the British government for the suppression of his grandfather’s papers, he assigns as a reason for his delay in giving them to the world, that he could not afford to publish them at his own expense, and no publisher in London would take them on other conditions. It is difficult to reconcile this plea with the philanthropic motive for inaction set up in his preface to the edition of his grandfather’s works, which he finally published ten years later, and in which he says that to have committed them sooner to the press “would have been much more to his pecuniary advantage”; or with that other statement in the same preface, that he had delayed the publication of his grandfather’s writings “that they might not be the means of awakening painful recollections or of rekindling the dying embers of animosity.”

      There is another bit of evidence on this subject only lately submitted to the public, which deserves to be carefully weighed in determining the motives for this mysterious delay. In a letter to M. le Veillard, written by William Temple Franklin from London, bearing date April 22, 1791, in reply to an urgent appeal to come to Paris to arrange about bringing out simultaneously a French as well as an English edition, of his grandfather’s works, he wrote:

       I received last night, my dear friend, your letter of the 12th inst. I am as sensible as you can be of the advantage that would result from my being at present in Paris, and I can assure you I am equally desirous of it. But business of the last importance, and that interested me personally, has hitherto detained me here; that, however, is now happily completed, and I am at present constantly occupied in the arrangement of my late grandfather’s papers, which were left in the greatest disorder. Whether I am able to complete this or not, I shall certainly leave London for Paris in the course of a fortnight. But my wish is, if possible, to finish this, and my bargain with the booksellers, before I set off, that I may not be obliged to return hither merely on that account. Were it only the Life, it would already have been done; but I wish a complete edition of his works to appear at the same time, and as I have no assistance, the necessary preparations are very laborious. I am very sorry that any part of the Life should have already appeared in France, however imperfect, which I understand it is. I have endeavored, and I hope effectually, to put a stop to a translation appearing here. Adieu, etc.

      William Temple’s expectations of getting to Paris in a few weeks were not realized. Two months later he is still in London, from whence he addresses the following letter to M. le Veillard:

      London, 14 June, 1791.

      I am much distressed, my dear friend, at what you say you suffer from my not arriving in Paris. I have been wishing to be there as much as you could wish to see me, but I could not possibly think of leaving this while a business I had undertaken was pending for which I received a salary, and which, being now completed, affords me a profit of seven thousand pounds sterling! This, my dear friend, has hitherto kept me here, having only been finally terminated on the 11th inst. I am in hopes you will think my excuse for staying till it was done a good one. I have now only some few arrangements to make in consequence of my success, and shall undoubtedly be with you before the conclusion of this month. My respects to your family and all inquiring friends, and believe me unalterably, etc.

      About the date of this letter Dr. Franklin had been dead but about a year; the writer had been in London barely six months. He never pretended in his correspondence, before, to have any other business there than to edit his grandfather’s works. He suddenly engages himself upon a salary; in less than six months finishes his business and pockets a profit of £7000, or say $35,000. While earning this handsome sum he was apparently a free man, constantly writing to M. le Veillard that he was expecting to go in a few days or weeks to Paris, being only detained in London to finish his book. It is not easy to imagine any salaried employment, especially such a profitable one as this seemed to be, which imposed so slight a restraint upon the movements of its beneficiary.

      Fully appreciating the difficulty of making any defence of William Temple’s conduct which will exempt it entirely from suspicion, a careful consideration of all the evidence and the somewhat irresponsible character of the man rather leads to the conclusion that all the reasons that he assigned for his delay had their weight with him, though perhaps in different proportions. His aversion “to awakening painful recollections, and of rekindling the dying embers of animosity,” was most natural.

      His father, William Franklin, was an officer of the Crown when the rebellion broke out. Instead of joining with his father in the war for independence, he adhered to the Crown, was deprived of his liberty, and then driven into exile. The British government rewarded his loyalty with a pension. Upon that the father and perhaps, to some extent, the son were dependent. Then, too, in the state of feeling which still prevailed in England toward the revolted colonies, the publication of an elaborate edition of the writings of the one man whom, more than any or all other persons, she held responsible for the success of that revolt, could not possibly have proved acceptable to her governing classes. It might and probably would have put Governor Franklin’s pension in peril, and, so far from gratifying the family pride either of father or son, must have proved, for the rest of their lives, a perennial source of mortification and shame.

      William Temple Franklin was then living in London with his father. That he should consider the interests of his father, who was living and whose declining years might be made miserable by this publication, rather than the fame of his grandfather, who was dead and beyond the reach of human praise or criticism, is not strange or certainly is less strange, though less loyal to his grandfather’s memory, than the lack of such forbearance would have been.

      William Temple was doubtless justified in denying the imputation that he had sold his grandfather’s papers to the British government, or that he had entertained any negotiations with them for the suppression of them.

      The £7000, if he ever received any such sum, may have been the proceeds of some job or contract which his father, towards whom the government no doubt felt kindly, may have procured, and in which he may have given his son an interest to indemnify him for deferring his publication. This, of course, is only conjecture, but it is far more probable than that the British government, several years after the peace, should have paid that or any other sum to stifle the utterances of any rebel American.

      William Temple Franklin’s edition finally appeared in London in 1817-1819 in three quarto volumes, and, by an arrangement with Mr. William Duane, appeared in Philadelphia in six octavo volumes. The Philadelphia edition includes some papers which are not to be found in the London edition. The late Henry Stevens reports Mr. Colburn, who was the publisher of the