Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 August 1909 — THE REAL FRANKLIN. [ARTICLE]

THE REAL FRANKLIN.

Small Honor Paid, the Mpjnory of Our. Famous Patriot. F There were, not. wanting sinister influences, subtly and persistently inhibiting the' development of that large, explicit and national recognition of Franklin’s services which a very little thing might have called, into full being and activity even during his lifetime. Had that consummation been realized even for a day, though it had been but the day after his death, the character of his fame would have been fixed differently, one cannot doubt, for the refit of time. For there would then have come fully and simultaneously into the national consciousness a conception of Franklin which —instead of the legend of the Philadelphia printer, almanacmaker and humorist, or instead of the legend of the moral philosopher who taught men how to thrive in business and inculcated the practice of honesty ■»s one of the best tricks of every trade -should have given us the legend of that historical Franklin, the most famous patriot, the wisest statesman, the most successful diplomatist of his age, a man with whose name all Europe—whatever America may have been doing or thinking of, then and since—once rang from side to side, and whose presence in the world filled the mind of his generation with the ideas of enlightenment, magnanimity and freedom. —William MacDonald in the Atlantic.