human probability never will be so long as we retain even the semblance of a republic.

This was Franklin's greatest and most permanent service to his country, more valuable than his work in England or France, and a fitting close to his long life. The most active period of his life, as he has told us, was between his seventieth and eighty-second years. How much can be done in eighty vigorous years, and what labors had he performed and what pleasures and vast experiences enjoyed in that time! Few men do their best work at such a great age. Moses, however, we are told, was eighty years old before he began his life's greatest work of leading the children of Israel out of Egypt. But it would be difficult to find any other instances in history except Franklin.

After the Constitution as prepared by the convention had been engrossed and read, it became a question whether all the members of the convention could be persuaded to sign it, and Franklin handed one of his happy speeches to Mr. Wilson to be read. He admitted that the Constitution did not satisfy him; it was not as he would have had it prepared ; but still he would sign it. With all its faults it was better than none. A new convention would not make a better one, for it would merely bring together a new set of prejudices and passions. He was old enough, he said, to doubt somewhat the infallibility of his own judgment. He was willing to believe that others might be right as well as he; and he amused the members with his humor and the witty story of the French lady who, in a dispute

with her sister, said, "I don't know how it happens, sister, but I meet with nobody but myself that is always in the right."

"It therefore astonishes me, sir, to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does; and I think it will astonish our enemies, who are waiting with confidence to hear that our councils are confounded, like those of the builders of Babel, and that our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another's throats.

"On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish, that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument."

At the close of the reading of his speech Franklin moved that the Constitution be signed, and offered as a convenient form,

"Done in Convention by the unanimous consent of the States present the 17th day of September, etc. In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names."

Madison explains that this form, with the words "consent of the States," had been drawn up by Gouverneur Morris to gain the doubtful States' rights party. It was given to Franklin, he says, "that it might have the better chance of success."

"Whilst the last members were signing," says Madison, “Dr. Franklin, looking towards the president's chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. 'I have,' said he, 'often and often in the course of the session and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the president, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting, but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.

So Franklin, from whose life picturesqueness and charm were seldom absent, gave, in his easy manner, to the close of the dry details of the convention a touch of beautiful and true sentiment which can never be dissociated from the history of the republic he had helped to create.

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