The end of the war permitted the resumption of amiable correspondence with old friends in England, most notably his fellow printer William Strahan, to whom he had written the famous but unsent letter nine years earlier declaring “you are now my enemy.” By 1780, he had mellowed enough to draft a letter signed “your formerly affectionate friend,” which he then changed to “your long affectionate humble servant.” By 1784, he was signing himself “most affectionately.”
Once again they debated Franklin’s theories that top government officials should serve without pay and that England’s society and government were inherently corrupt. Now, however, the tone was bantering as Franklin suggested that the Americans, who “have some remains of affection” for the British, perhaps should help govern them. “If you have not sense and virtue enough left to govern yourselves,” he wrote, “dissolve your present old crazy constitution and send members to Congress.” Lest Strahan not realize he was joking, Franklin confessed: “You will say my advice smells of Madeira. You are right. This foolish letter is mere chitchat between ourselves over the second bottle.”
TO WILLIAM STRAHAN, FEBRUARY 16, 1784
Dear Sir,
I received and read with pleasure your kind letter of the first as it informed me of the welfare of you and yours. I am glad the accounts you have from your kinswomen at Philadelphia are agreeable, and I shall be happy if any recommendations from me can be serviceable to Dr. Ross or any other friend of yours going to America.
Your arguments persuading me to come once more to England, are very powerful. To be sure I long to see again my friends there, whom I love abundantly: but there are difficulties and objections of several kinds which at present I do not see how to get over.
I lament with you the political disorders England at present labors under. Your papers are full of strange accounts of anarchy and confusion in America, of which we know nothing; while your own affairs are really in a situation deplorable. In my humble opinion the root of the evil lies, not so much in too long or too unequally chosen parliaments, as in the enormous salaries, emoluments, and patronage of your great offices; and that you will never be at rest till they are all abolished, and every place of honor made, at the same time, in stead of a place of profit, a place of expense and burthen. Ambition and avarice are each of them strong passions, and when they are united in the same persons, and have the same objects in view for their gratification, they are too strong for public spirit and love of country, and are apt to produce the most violent factions and contentions. They should therefore be separated, and made to act one against the other. Those places, to speak in our own old style, (brother type) may be for the good of the chapel, but they are bad for the master, as they create constant quarrels that hinder the business.
For example, here are near two months that your government has been employed in getting its form to press; which is not yet fit to work on, every page of it being squabbled, and the whole ready to fall into pie. The founts too must be very scanty, or strangely out of sorts, since your compositors cannot find either upper- or lower-case letters sufficient to set the word administration, but are forced to be continually turning for them. However, to return to common (though perhaps too saucy) language, don’t despair; you have still one resource left, and that not a bad one since it may reunite the empire. We have some remains of affection for you, and shall always be ready to receive and take care of you in case of distress. So, if you have not sense and virtue enough left to govern yourselves, even dissolve your present old crazy constitution, and send members to Congress.
You will say my advice smells of Madeira. You are right. This foolish letter is mere chit-chat between ourselves, over the second bottle: if therefore you show it to any body (except our indulgent friends Dagge and Lady Strahan) I will positively solless you.
TO WILLIAM STRAHAN, AUGUST 19, 1784
Dear friend,
…You press me much to come to England; I am not without strong inducements to do so; the fund of knowledge you promise to communicate to me is an addition to them, and no small one. At present it is impracticable. But when my grandson returns, come with him. We will then talk the matter over, and perhaps you may take me back with you. I have a bed at your service, and will try to make your residence, while you can stay with us, as agreeable to you if possible, as I am sure it will be to me.
You do not approve the annihilation of profitable places, for you do not see why a statesman who does his business well, should not be paid for his labor as well as any other workman. Agreed. But why more than any other workman? The less the salary the greater the honor. In so great a nation there are many rich enough to afford giving their time to the public, and there are, I make no doubt many wise and able men who would take as much pleasure in governing for nothing as they do in playing chess for nothing. It would be one of the noblest of amusements. That this opinion is not chimerical the country I now live in affords a proof, its whole civil and criminal law administration being done for nothing, or in some sense for less than nothing, since the members of its judiciary parliaments buy their places, and do not make more than three per cent, for their money, by their fees and emoluments, while the legal interest is five: so that in fact they give two per cent, to be allowed to govern, and all their time and trouble into the bargain. Thus profit, one motive for desiring place, being abolished, there remains only ambition; and that being in some degree balanced by loss, you may easily conceive that there will not be very violent factions and contentions for such places; nor much of the mischief to the country that attends your factions, which have often occasioned wars, and overloaded you with debts impayable.
I allow all the force of your joke upon the vagrancy of our Congress. They have a right to sit where they please, of which perhaps they have made too much use by shifting too often but they have two other rights; those of sitting when they please, and as long as they please, in which methinks they have the advantage of your Parliament; for they cannot be dissolved by the breath of a minister, and sent packing as you were the other day, when it was your earnest desire to have remained longer together.
You fairly acknowledge that the late war terminated quite contrary to your expectation. Your expectation was ill founded; for you would not believe your old friend, who told you repeatedly that by those measures England would lose her colonies, as Epictetus warned in vain his master that he would break his leg. You believed rather the tales you heard of our poltroonery and impotence of body and mind. Do you not remember the story you told me of the Scotch sergeant, who met with a party of forty American soldiers, and though alone disarmed them all and brought them in prisoners; a story almost as improbable as that of the Irishman, who pretended to have alone taken and brought in five of the enemy, by surrounding them. And yet, my friend, sensible and judicious as you are, but partaking of the general infatuation, you seemed to believe it. The word general puts me in mind of a general, your general Clarke, who had the folly to say in my hearing at Sir John Pringle’s, that with a thousand British grenadiers he would undertake to go from one end of America to the other and geld all the males partly by force and partly by a little coaxing. It is plain he took us for a species of animals very little superior to brutes. The Parliament too believed the stories of another foolish general, I forget his name, that the Yankees never felt bold. Yankee was understood to be a sort of yahoo, and the Parliament did not think the petitions of such creatures were fit to be received and read in so wise an assembly.
What was the consequence of this monstrous pride and insolence? You first send small armies to subdue us, believing them more than sufficient, but soon found yourselves obliged to send greater; these whenever they ventured to penetrate our country beyond the protection of their ships, were either repulsed and obliged to scamper out, or were surrounded, beaten, and taken prisoners.
An American planter who had never seen Europe, was chosen by us to command our troops and continued during the whole war. This man sent home to you, one after another, five of your best generals, baffled, their heads bare of laurels, disgraced even in the opinion of their employers. Your contempt of our understandings in comparison with your own appeared to be not much better founded than that of our courage, if we may judge by this circumstance, that in whatever court of Europe a Yankee negotiator appeared, the wise British minister was put in a passion, picked a quarrel with your friends, and was sent home with a flea in his ear.
But after all my dear friend, do not imagine that I am vain enough to ascribe our success to any superiority in any of those points. I am too well acquainted with all the springs and levers of our machine, not to see that our human means were unequal to our undertaking, and that if it had not been for the justice of our cause, and the consequent interposition of providence in which we had faith we must have been ruined. If I had ever before been an atheist I should now have been convinced of the being and government of a deity. It is he who abases the proud and favors the humble! May we never forget his goodness to us, and may our future conduct manifest our gratitude.
But let us leave these serious reflections and converse with our usual pleasantry. I remember your observing once to me, as we sat together in the House of Commons, that no two journeymen printers within your knowledge had met with such success in the world as ourselves. You were then at the head of your profession, and soon afterward became a member of that Parliament. I was an agent for a few provinces and now act for them all. But we have risen by different modes. I as a republican printer, always liked a form well planed down; being averse to those overbearing letters that hold their heads so high as to hinder their neighbors from appearing. You as a monarchist chose to work upon crown paper, and found it profitable; while I worked upon pro-patria (often indeed called fools-cap) with no less advantage. Both our heaps hold out very well, and we seem likely to make a pretty good day’s work of it. With regard to public affairs, (to continue in the same stile) it seems to me that the compositors in your chapel do not cast off their copy well, nor perfectly understand imposing, their forms too are continually pestered by the outs, and doubles, that are not easy to be corrected. And I think they were wrong in laying aside some faces, and particularly certain head-pieces, that would have been both useful and ornamental. But, courage! The business may still flourish with good management; and the master become as rich as any of the company.
By the way, the rapid growth and extension of the English language in America, must become greatly advantageous to the booksellers, and holders of copy rights in England. A vast audience is assembling there for English authors, ancient, present and future, our people doubling every twenty years; and this will demand large, and of course profitable, impressions of your most valuable books. I would therefore if I possessed such rights, entail them, if such a thing be practicable, upon my posterity; for their worth will be continually augmenting. This may look a little like advice, and yet I have drank no Madeira these ten months. The subject however leads me to another thought, which is, that you do wrong to discourage the emigration of Englishmen to America. In my piece on population, I have proved, I think, that emigration does not diminish but multiplies a nation. You will not have fewer at home for those that go abroad, and as every man who comes among us, and takes up a piece of land, becomes a citizen, and by our constitution has a voice in elections and a share in the government of the country, why should you be against acquiring by this fair means a repossession of it, and leave it to be taken by foreigners of all nations and languages who by their numbers may drown and stifle the English, which otherwise would probably become in the course of two centuries the most extensive language in the world, the Spanish only excepted. It is a fact that the Irish emigrants and their children are now in possession of the government of Pennsylvania, by their majority in the assembly, as well as of a great part of the territory; and I remember well the first ship that brought any of them over. I am ever, my dear friend,