The Age of Invention | Page 9

The envoys appointed to act with him proved a
handicap rather than a help, and the great burden of a difficult and
momentous mission was thus laid upon an old man of seventy. But no
other American could have taken his place. His reputation in France
was already made, through his books and inventions and discoveries.

To the corrupt and licentious court he was the personification of the age
of simplicity, which it was the fashion to admire; to the learned, he was
a sage; to the common man he was the apotheosis of all the virtues; to
the rabble he was little less than a god. Great ladies sought his smiles;
nobles treasured a kindly word; the shopkeeper hung his portrait on the
wall; and the people drew aside in the streets that he might pass without
annoyance. Through all this adulation Franklin passed serenely, if not
unconsciously.
The French ministers were not at first willing to make a treaty of
alliance, but under Franklin's influence they lent money to the
struggling colonies. Congress sought to finance the war by the issue of
paper currency and by borrowing rather than by taxation, and sent bill
after bill to Franklin, who somehow managed to meet them by putting
his pride in his pocket, and applying again and again to the French
Government. He fitted out privateers and negotiated with the British
concerning prisoners. At length he won from France recognition of the
United States and then the Treaty of Alliance.
Not until two years after the Peace of 1783 would Congress permit the
veteran to come home. And when he did return in 1785 his people
would not allow him to rest. At once he was elected President of the
Council of Pennsylvania and twice reelected in spite of his protests. He
was sent to the Convention of 1787 which framed the Constitution of
the United States. There he spoke seldom but always to the point, and
the Constitution is the better for his suggestions. With pride he axed his
signature to that great instrument, as he had previously signed the
Albany Plan of Union, the Declaration of Independence, and the Treaty
of Paris.
Benjamin Franklin's work was done. He was now an old man of
eighty-two summers and his feeble body was racked by a painful
malady. Yet he kept his face towards the morning. About a hundred of
his letters, written after this time, have been preserved. These letters
show no retrospection, no looking backward. They never mention "the
good old times." As long as he lived, Franklin looked forward. His
interest in the mechanical arts and in scientific progress seems never to
have abated. He writes in October, 1787, to a friend in France,
describing his experience with lightning conductors and referring to the
work of David Rittenhouse, the celebrated astronomer of Philadelphia.

On the 31st of May in the following year he is writing to the Reverend
John Lathrop of Boston:
"I have long been impressed with the same sentiments you so well
express, of the growing felicity of mankind, from the improvement in
philosophy, morals, politics, and even the conveniences of common
living, and the invention of new and useful utensils and instruments; so
that I have sometimes wished it had been my destiny to be born two or
three centuries hence. For invention and improvement are prolific, and
beget more of their kind. The present progress is rapid. Many of great
importance, now unthought of, will, before that period, be produced."
Thus the old philosopher felt the thrill of dawn and knew that the day
of great mechanical inventions was at hand. He had read the meaning
of the puffing of the young steam engine of James Watt and he had
heard of a marvelous series of British inventions for spinning and
weaving. He saw that his own countrymen were astir, trying to
substitute the power of steam for the strength of muscles and the fitful
wind. John Fitch on the Delaware and James Rumsey on the Potomac
were already moving vessels by steam. John Stevens of New York and
Hoboken had set up a machine shop that was to mean much to
mechanical progress in America. Oliver Evans, a mechanical genius of
Delaware, was dreaming of the application of high-pressure steam to
both road and water carriages. Such manifestations, though still very
faint, were to Franklin the signs of a new era.
And so, with vision undimmed, America's most famous citizen lived on
until near the end of the first year of George Washington's
administration. On April 17, 1790, his unconquerable spirit took its
flight.
In that year, 1790, was taken the First Census of the United States. The
new nation had a population of about four million people. It then
included practically the present