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will have its full and ultimate record in the volume 

 which this Society will transmit to learned societies 

 through the world. It will give the acts and the char- 

 acter which have placed Franklin alone in all history 

 as the one man who inspired the enthusiasm of France 

 and satisfied the sober judgment of the English-speak- 

 ing race the solitary and unique figure in our history 

 or in any history whose work and fame and name is 

 alike honored, cherished and loved by the two 

 opposing streams whose conflict is the history of twenty 

 human centuries the Latin and the Teuton. 



Many biographers have emulated the record in which 

 Franklin, all too briefly, told the story of his early life. 

 We have to-night with us the only one of these biog- 

 raphers who has set in life and light those dreary past 

 Revolutionary years, when as in those now passing 

 and passed the high tide of war had ebbed and uncov- 

 ered endless corruption when, as to-day, the State must 

 be served and saved, if served and saved at all, while 

 the clash of party and the din of faction drowned the 

 nobler voice of principle. In describing that period 

 when the hands of Franklin guided to its last, its final, its 

 eternal abiding place the corner-stone of constitutional 

 liberty, and all the morning stars of heaven sang to- 

 gether with joy as the pillars of organic law arose 

 above the foundations of freedom, our historian has 

 described the character and achievements of Franklin 

 in a passage which will be cherished and remembered 

 with the like utterances of Jeffrey and of Mackintosh ; of 

 Brougham and of Brancroft. He resumes to-night the 

 task which he there began. I need not introduce, I 

 need only present to you, the youngest and most widely 

 read of American historians, John Bach McMaster, who 

 will give you 



