In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the a. A. ALVORD, STEREOTYPER AND PRINTER. LIFE AND TIMES OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. PART IV.-CONTINUED. CHAPTER IX. THE TORIES RAGE, AND THE WHIGS IMAGINE A VAIN THING. ENGLAND had lost her colonies, though no one yet suspected it. Madness now seized both parties; only there was method in the madness of the colonists. It is not ours to relate the public events which accompanied and followed the scenes just described: such as the destruction of the tea in Boston harbor; the passage of Lord North's avenging measure, called the Boston Port Bill; the adoption of the cause of Boston as their own by the other colonies; six regiments of British troops posted in Boston; the calm protests of Washington, Lee, and Jefferson; the wild eloquence of Patrick Henry; the passage of the bill transferring political offenders to England for trial, with their train of witnesses and advocates; the torrents of petitions against these measures; the haughty rejection of these petitions; the tumults in America; the exasperating insolence of the king's speeches to Parliament; and, above all, the meeting of the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. All these things have been eloquently told by Mr. Bancroft, and are familiar to decently informed persons in every land. America became the universal topic, France appearing to be more interested in it than England, though there were in Parliament fifty "field-night" debates upon America during the next three or four years. How the tories raved against America! "Sir," Dr. Johnson would say, "the Americans are a race of convicts, and ought to be At this crisis he wrote thankful for any thing we can give them." his extravagant pamphlet, "Taxation no Tyranny," a production which the ministry instigated and revised. The old tory followed the custom of his employers in styling Franklin the "master of mischief," who taught Congress "to put in motion the engine of electricity, and give the great stroke by the name of Boston." Johnson could not even be witty in this cause, so bitter was his malevolence. Indeed, his animosity against the Americans was such that his friends often sat confounded at the spectacle of his wrath. Talking pleasantly, one day, with Miss Sewall and other ladies, upon the universal benevolence enjoined by Christianity, he chanced to say, "I am willing to love all mankind except an American." Instantly, says Boswell, "his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he breathed out threatenings and slaughter, calling them rascals, robbers, pirates, and exclaiming he'd burn and destroy them." The lady gave him a mild but cutting rebuke. “Sir,” said she, “this is an instance that we are always most violent against those whom we have injured." At which, says Bozzy," he roared out another tremendous volley, which, one might fancy, could be heard across the Atlantic." On another occasion Boswell ventured the audacity of praising Dr. Franklin's famous definition of Man: "A tool-making animal." Johnson was upon him straight. "Many a man," said he, never made a tool; and suppose a man without arms, he could not make a tool." Such poor nonsense could this wittiest of savages utter when an American was the object of attack. The tories in Parliament, in the cabinet, in the palace, were less savage than their pamphleteer, but they were not less arrogant, ignorant, and infatuated. And the men of liberal minds, unhappily, were dissolute. The errors of virtuous men tend to bring virtue itself into disrepute. Perhaps a man like George III., who possessed and represented such virtue as there then was in England, makes more roués and debauchees than such a king as George IV., who was himself a roué and debauchee; for the one renders virtue odious, and the other renders vice odious. However that may be, it is certain that the younger men of that day, who might have rescued their country from the king, were dissipated beyond all English parallel. There was Charles James Fox, for example, the gallant Prince Hal of politics, he could have saved his country, with Burke's mighty help, |