BENJAMIN FRANKLIN : THE FIRST CIVILIZED AMERICAN. By Phillips Russell.
(Ernest Benn. 25s.)— Benjamin Franklin was a great man in whom both America and England may take pride, and there was plenty of room for a new biography of him. Mr. Russell has succeeded up to a point. He would have done better if he had not described his book as a study in the light of the new psychology," and if he were not always taking the offensive against the old-fashioned biographers, of the edifying type, who tried to represent Franklin and other Fathers of the Republic as so many plaster saints. To English readers who do not know the American books that have exasperated Mr. Russell, his vehemence will appear surprising and rather tiresome. Yet Franklin's career is so interesting in itself that not even a biographer's vagaries can spoil it. He had his share of human weakness, of course, but he was certainly one of the wisest and best men of his time, and the services which he rendered to America as her representative in France during the revolution were immense. Mr. Russell quotes freely from Poor Richard's Almanac, in which " was founded the great American Philo- sophy of Get-on " ; but it is hard on Franklin to debit him with all the excesses of American materialism. The book is uncommonly well illustrated with portraits.
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