like a large drawing-room with an open fireplace at one end. The fireplace projected into the room, and in one of the recesses at the side of it Franklin stood, not far behind Lord Gower, president of the Council, who had his back to the fireplace.

Franklin's astute counsel, John Dunning, a famous barrister, afterwards Lord Ashburton, told him that his peace and love theory was not a very good ground to rest his case on before the Council. It would be well not to use the Hutchinson letters at all, or refer to them as little as possible; for the Privy Council believed every word in them to be true, and the passages in them which had most inflamed the colonists were the very ones which were most acceptable to the Council.

So Dunning made a speech in which he said that no crime or offence was charged against Hutchinson and Oliver; they were in no way attacked or accused; the colonists were simply asking a favor of His Majesty, which was that the governor and the lieutenant-governor had become so distasteful to the people that it would be good policy and tend to peace and quiet to remove them.

It was a ridiculous attempt, of course, and none knew better than Dunning that there was not the slightest hope of success. The Privy Council would never have taken up the petition, it would have slept in the dust of its pigeon-hole, if the council had not seen in it a way of attacking Franklin. Wedderburn's speech was the event awaited, and to it the Tories looked forward as to a cock-fight or a bullbaiting.

A little volume published in England and to be found in some of the libraries in America contains an account of the proceedings and gives a large part of Wedderburn's speech. He has been most abundantly abused in America and by Whigs in England as an unprincipled office-seeker and a shallow orator, with no other talent than that of invective. That he was successful in obtaining office and rising to high distinction as an ardent Tory cannot be denied, and in this respect he did not differ materially from others or from the Whigs themselves when they had their innings. As to the charge of shallowness, it is not borne out by his speech on this occasion. Once concede his point of view as a Tory, and the speech is a very clever one.

He began by a history of Hutchinson's useful public career in Massachusetts; and there is no question that Hutchinson had been a most valuable official; even the Massachusetts people themselves conceded that. The difficulty with Hutchinson was the same as with Wedderburn,-his point of view was not ours. Having reviewed Hutchinson, he went on to show how ridiculous it was to suppose that he alone had been the cause of sending the troops to Boston, and in this he was again probably right. The home government, as he well said, had abundant other means of information from General Gage, Sir Francis Bernard, and its officials all through the colonies; and he concluded this part of his speech with the point that Hutchinson, by the admission of Massachusetts herself, had never done anything wrong except write these letters, and would

it not be ridiculous to dismiss a man for giving information which had been furnished by a host of others?

Then he turned his attention to Franklin. How had he obtained those letters? And here it must be confessed that Franklin was in a scrape, and from the Tory point of view was fair game. He could not disclose the name of the member of Parliament who gave them to him, for he had promised not to do so, and even without this promise it would have been wanton cruelty to have subjected the man to the ruin and disgrace that would have instantly fallen upon him. Nothing could drag this secret from Franklin. He refused to answer questions on the subject, and it is a secret to this day, as it is also still a secret who was the mother of his son. Ingenious persons have written about one as about the other, and supposed and guessed and piled up probabilities to no purpose. Franklin told the world more private matters than is usual with men in his position; but in the two matters on which he had determined to withhold knowledge the world has sought for it in vain.

Praiseworthy as his conduct may have been in this respect, it gave his opponents an advantage which we must admit they were entitled to take. If, as Wedderburn put it, he refused to tell from whom he received the letters, they were at liberty to suppose the worst, and the worst was that he had obtained them by improper means and fraud.

For a time which must have seemed like years to Franklin, Wedderburn drew out and played on this

point with most exasperating skill. Gentlemen respect private correspondence. They do not usually steal people's letters and print them. Even a foreign ambassador on the outbreak of war would hardly be justified in stealing documents. Must he not have

known as soon as the letters were handed to him that honorable permission to use them could be obtained only from the family of Whately? Why had he chosen to bring that family into painful notoriety and one of them within a step of being murdered? He had sent the letters to Massachusetts with the address removed from them, and he was here supporting the petition with nothing but copies of the letters. He would, forsooth, have removed from office a governor in the midst of a long career of usefulness on the ground of letters the originals of which he could not produce and which he dared not tell how he had obtained.

The orator went on to cite some of Franklin's letters to the people in Massachusetts encouraging them in their opposition. He read the resolutions of New England town meetings, and gave what, indeed, was a truthful description, from his point of view, of the measures taken for resistance in America. Franklin was aspiring to be Governor of Massachusetts in the place of Hutchinson, that was the secret of the whole affair, he said; and as for that beautiful argument that Hutchinson and Oliver had incensed the mother country against the colonies, what absurdity!

We are perpetually told, he said, of men's incensing the mother country against the colonies,

but we hear nothing of the vast variety of acts which have been made use of to incense the colonies against the mother country, setting at defiance the king's authority, treating Parliament as usurpers, pulling down the houses of royal officials and attacking their persons, burning His Majesty's ships of war, and denying the supreme jurisdiction of the British empire; and yet these people pretend a great concern about these letters as having a tendency to incense the parent state against the colonies, and would have a governor turned out because he reports their doings. "Was it to confute or prevent the pernicious effect of these letters that the good men of Boston have lately held their meetings, appointed their committees, and with their usual moderation destroyed the cargo of three British ships?"

While this ferocious attack was being delivered,— and it is said to have been delivered in thundering tones, emphasized by terrible blows of the orator's fist on a cushion before him on the table,-Franklin stood with head erect, unmoved, and without the slightest change upon his face from the beginning to the end. When all was over he went out, silent, dignified, without a word or sign to any one except that, as he passed Dr. Priestley, he secretly pressed his hand. His superb nerves and physique again raised him far above the occasion.

It was one of the most remarkable traits of his wonderful personality that in all the great trials of his life he could give a dramatic interest and force to the situation which in the end turned everything in his favor. Burke said that his examination be