<h2> <SPAN name="franklin" id="franklin"></SPAN>THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN </h2>
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<h3> [written about 1870] </h3>
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<p>["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as
well."—B. F.]</p>
<p>This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers. He was
twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of
Boston. These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them worded
in accordance with the facts. The signs are considered well enough to
have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out the two
birthplaces to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as several
times in the same day. The subject of this memoir was of a vicious
disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims
and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation
of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a
view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever—boys
who might otherwise have been happy. It was in this spirit that he became
the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason than that the
efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might be looked upon
with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers. With a
malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day,
and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of
a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or
else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.</p>
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<p>Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on
bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal-time—a thing which
has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read
Franklin's pernicious biography.</p>
<p>His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot
follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those
everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot. If he buys
two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has
said, my son—'A grout a day's a penny a year"'; and the comfort is
all gone out of those peanuts. If he wants to spin his top when he has
done work, his father quotes, "Procrastination is the thief of time." If
he does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it, because "Virtue
is its own reward." And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his
natural rest, because Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights
of malignity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Early to bed and early to rise<br/> Makes a man healthy and wealthy and
wise.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on
such terms. The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents,
experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell. The legitimate result is
my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration. My
parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morning sometimes
when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest where would I
have been now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.</p>
<p>And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was! In order
to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key on the
string and let on to be fishing for lightning. And a guileless public
would go home chirping about the "wisdom" and the "genius" of the hoary
Sabbath-breaker. If anybody caught him playing "mumblepeg" by himself,
after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be ciphering out
how the grass grew—as if it was any of his business. My grandfather
knew him well, and he says Franklin was always fixed—always ready.
If a body, during his old age, happened on him unexpectedly when he was
catching flies, or making mud-pies, or sliding on a cellar door, he would
immediately look wise, and rip out a maxim, and walk off with his nose in
the air and his cap turned wrong side before, trying to appear
absent-minded and eccentric. He was a hard lot.</p>
<p>He invented a stove that would smoke your head off in four hours by the
clock. One can see the almost devilish satisfaction he took in it by his
giving it his name.</p>
<p>He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia for the first
time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four
rolls of bread under his arm. But really, when you come to examine it
critically, it was nothing. Anybody could have done it.</p>
<p>To the subject of this memoir belongs the honor of recommending the army
to go back to bows and arrows in place of bayonets and muskets. He
observed, with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well under
some circumstances, but that he doubted whether it could be used with
accuracy at a long range.</p>
<p>Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and
made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a
son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No;
the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he
worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become
wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel; and also to
snub his stove, and his military inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to
make himself conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and his flying his
kite and fooling away his time in all sorts of such ways when he ought to
have been foraging for soap-fat, or constructing candles.</p>
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<p>I merely desired to do away with somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea
among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working
for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of
waiting till morning like a Christian; and that this program, rigidly
inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father's fool. It is time these
gentlemen were finding out that these execrable eccentricities of instinct
and conduct are only the evidences of genius, not the creators of it. I
wish I had been the father of my parents long enough to make them
comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let their son have an
easier time of it. When I was a child I had to boil soap, notwithstanding
my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early and study geometry at
breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do everything just as Franklin
did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin some day. And here I
am.</p>
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