slavery." I see Samuel Adams, impoverished, living upon a pittance,
hardly able to provide a decent coat for his back, rejecting with scorn
the offer of a profitable office, wealth, a title even, to win him from
his allegiance to the cause of America. I see Robert Morris, the wealthy
merchant, opening his purse and pledging his credit to support the
Revolution, and later devoting all his fortune and his energy to restore
and establish the financial honor of the Republic, with the memorable
words, "The United States may command all that I have, except my
integrity." I hear the proud John Adams saying to his wife, "I have
accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have
consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and the ruin of our children";
and I hear her reply, with the tears running down her face, "Well, I am
willing in this cause to run all risks with you, and be ruined with you,
if you are ruined," I see Benjamin Franklin, in the Congress of 1776,
already past his seventieth year, prosperous, famous, by far the most
celebrated man in America, accepting without demur the difficult and
dangerous mission to France, and whispering to his friend, Dr. Rush, "I
am old and good for nothing, but as the store-keepers say of their
remnants of cloth, 'I am but a fag-end, and you may have me for what
you please.'"

Here is a man who will illustrate and prove, perhaps better than any
other of those who stood with Washington, the point at which I am
aiming. There was none of the glamour of romance about old Ben Franklin.
He was shrewd, canny, humorous. The chivalric Southerners disliked his
philosophy, and the solemn New-Englanders mistrusted his jokes. He made
no extravagant claims for his own motives, and some of his ways were not
distinctly ideal. He was full of prudential proverbs, and claimed to be
a follower of the theory of enlightened self-interest. But there was not
a faculty of his wise old head which he did not put at the service of