190 



Poor," on " The Principles of Trade," on " Luxury, Idleness 

 and Industry," on war, privateering and the Court of the Peers, 

 and many kindred topics. None of his economical treatises 

 were so original or so influential as the two which were 

 first written. The last in the list, however, " On the Slave 

 Trade," although finished only twenty-four days before his 

 death and at the age of eighty-five, is as full of vigor and fire 

 as his best efforts of a quarter of a century previous. It con- 

 tains the speech of Mehemet Ibrahim in the Divan of Algiers, 

 which Lord Jeffrey declared was not surpassed by any of the 

 pleasantries of A_rbuthnot or Swift. 



POLITICAL WRITINGS. 



Franklin's first political treatise was written in 1747. 



The war between Great Britain and France, which was at 

 that time in progress, was thought to have brought the Amer- 

 ican colonies into great danger, and the governor of Pennsyl- 

 vania anxiously labored to prevail upon the Quaker Assembly 

 to pass a militia law and to make other provisions for the 

 security of the province. To further this project, Franklin 

 wrote and published a pamphlet, entitled "Plain Truth," which 

 had a sudden and surprising effect, and resulted in a few weeks 

 in the organization of a colonial militia of over ten thousand 

 men. This was the beginning of the conversion of the inhabi- 

 tants of Pennsylvania from the Quaker doctrine of submission 

 to that of defensive warfare, and had a most important influ- 

 ence upon the future of America.* 



*Bigelow says of this pamphlet : 



" Substituting the words ' United States ' for Pennsylvania, it is as timely to-day as 

 when it was written. Though we are at peace with all nations, we have many times as 

 many lives and many times as much property exposed, while our defenses are relatively 

 inferior to those which Franklin denounced nearly a century and a half ago as unpar- 

 donably deficient" (Bigelow's "Franklin," Vol. ii, p. 39). 



