Search -
Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin / by James Parton
Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin / by James Parton Author:James Parton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XH. SECRET NEGOTIATIONS WITH AGENTS OF THE MINISTRY. Ministers had assumed a bold front in these debates. We could hardly believe, if Dr. Franklin ... more »had not minutely recorded the facts, that during this whole period, from October to March, agents of the ministry were secretly negotiating, or, at least, tampering with Franklin, with a view, real or pretended, to effect an amicable arrangement of the dispute with the colonies. Lord North was troubled with a commodity of brains ; and brains enough are always on the side of honor, justice, truth, and freedom. Like Launcelot Gobbo in the play, he was pulled two ways at once; his intellect inclined him to the side of the Americans; his good nature and his fondness for the king made him a reluctant instrument of oppression. There was probably no hour from 1775 to 1733, in which he would not have preferred to resign rather than continuc to carry out the king's designs. But the spell of the royal closet enthralled him ; the seductive, flattering appeals of the king to the soft places in his heart subdned him, and the glories of his great place had their effect upon him. He is one among the thousand examples which prove that, let a man possess all good gifts and graces, talent, knowledge, good nature, and good intentions, and all in high degree, and yet lack firmness of purpose, he is of no avail in the strife of Right against Wrong. The unflinching king, whose inferior endowments made him the natural foe of freedom, subdued to his purposes, because he was unflinching, the witty and yielding Lord North, whose intellect impelled him to defend the liberties of man. It was to Lord North's reluctance and hesitation, that the events arc to be, in part, attributed, which we are now to relate. One evening, about the beginning of ...« less