XI

THE CONSTITUTION-MAKER

ALMOST immediately on Franklin's return to Philadelphia he was made President of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, under the extraordinary constitution he had helped to make before he went to France in 1776. This office was somewhat like that of the modern governor. He held it for three years, by annual re-elections, but without being involved in any notable questions or controversies.

He was at this period of his life still genial and mellow, in spite of disease, and full of anecdotes, learning, and curious experiences. His voice is described as low and his countenance open, frank, and pleasing.

He enjoyed what to him was one of the greatest pleasures of life, children and grandchildren. He had six grandchildren, and no doubt often wished that he had a hundred. He had no patience with celibacy, and was constantly urging marriage on his friends. To John Sargent he wrote,—

"The account you give me of your family is pleasing, except that your eldest son continues so long unmarried. I hope he does not intend to live and die in celibacy. The wheel of life that has rolled down to him from Adam without interruption should not stop with him. I would not have one dead unbearing branch in the genealogical tree of the Sargents. The married state is, after all our jokes, the happiest."

Sir Samuel Romilly, who visited him in Paris shortly before his return to America, says in his journal,

“Of all the celebrated persons whom in my life I have chanced to see, Dr. Franklin, both from his appearance and his conversation, seemed to me the most remarkable. His venerable patriarchal appearance, the simplicity of his manner and language, and the novelty of his observations, at least the novelty of them at that time to me, impressed me with an opinion of him as one of the most extraordinary men that ever existed." (Life of Romilly. Sons. Vol. i. p. 50.)

By his

He lived in a large house in Philadelphia, situated on a court long afterwards called by his name, a little back from the south side of Market Street, between Third and Fourth Streets. There was a small garden attached to it, and also a grass-plot on which was a large mulberry-tree, under which he often sat and received visitors on summer afternoons. He built a large addition to the house, comprising a library, a room for the meetings of the American Philosophical Society, with some bedrooms in the third story. Here he passed the closing years of his life with his daughter and six grandchildren, reading, writing, receiving visits from distinguished men, and playing cards in the winter evenings.

"I have indeed now and then," he writes to Mrs. Hewson, "a little compunction in reflecting that I spend time so idly; but another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering, 'You know that the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you? So, being easily convinced, and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason, when it is in favor of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”

He was soon, however, given very important employment in spite of his age. He had made himself famous in many varied spheres, from almanacs and stove-making to treaties of alliance. Nothing seemed to be too small or too great for him. He invented an apparatus for taking books from high shelves. He suggested that sailors could mitigate thirst by sitting in the salt water or soaking their clothes in it. The pores of the skin, he said, while large enough to admit the water, are too small to allow the salt to penetrate; and the experiment was successfully tried by shipwrecked crews. He suggested that bread and flour could be preserved for years in air-tight bottles, and Captain Cook tried it with good results in his famous voyage. It is certainly strange that the man who was so passionately interested in such subjects should enter the great domain of constitution-making and, in spite of many blunders, excel those who had made it their special study.

He had no knowledge of technical law, either in practice or as a science. He was once elected a justice of the peace in Philadelphia, but soon resigned, because, as he said, he knew nothing of the rules of English common law. It was perhaps the only important domain of human knowledge in which he was not interested.

As a public man of long experience he had considerable knowledge of general laws and their practical effect. He was a law-maker rather than a lawinterpreter. He understood colonial rights, and knew every phase of the controversy with Great