BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON THE EMPIRE.
Cro THE EDITOR OF THE "SrEcTA?oa.1 SIE,—On Friday, October 23rd, Mr. Choate delivered at Birmingham an address on Benjamin Franklin that more
than maintained the extraordinary reputation of a long line of American Ambassadors for such exercises. Like all Mr. Choate's public utterances, it was pungent, shrewd, judicial, admirably composed, and admirably delivered. But any present purpose in writing about it is not so much to draw attention to its excellences as a piece of literature and of historical criticism—we know Mr. Choate well enough by now to take all that for granted—as to reproduce a quotation from Franklin's writings which the speaker included in his address.
It is all but a hundred and thirty years old, but there seems to be almost as great a need for hammering it home to-day as there was in 1774:-
" It has long appeared to me that the only true British policy was that which aimed at the good of the whole British Empir, not that which sought the advantage of one part in tho dis- advantage of the others ; therefore all measures of procuring gain to the mother country arising from loss to her colonies, and all of procuring gain to the colonies arising from or occasioning loss to Britain, especially where the gain was small and the loss great, I in my own mind condemned as improper, partial, unjust and mischievous, tending to create dissensions and weaken that union on which the strength, solidity and duration of the Empire greatly depended."
[If we had obeyed the spirit of Franklin's words, we should never have lost America. Since that loss we have gradually schooled ourselves to act upon it. Till six months ago, indeed, we might unchallenged have called it the golden rule of the
Empire. God grant that we are not now going to reject it in a moment of national delirium, and by so doing destroy the only sound, because the only free, Empire that the world has ever seen.—ED. Spectator.]
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