DATE OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE SOCIETY. 185 



assumed in order to give the basis for Mr. Fisher's 

 contention ; and the arguments of the older Committee 

 (p. 85f) against Mr. Du Ponceau's statement of this 

 "improbability if not impossibility" are not convinc- 

 ing. 1 Your Committee believe that these negative con- 

 siderations of improbability, of silence, of the elastic 

 nature of such a word as "begun" or "founded," and 

 the positive evidence, not explicit, but cumulative and 

 persistent, of the minutes of the Junto, afterwards the 

 American Society, quite offset the scanty affirmative 



evidence, mainly that of Charles Thomson, brought out 

 by our predecessors in their report. 



There remain, then, the clear testimony of Mr. Du 

 Ponceau, the positive declarations of Bishop White and 

 Dr. Smith, and that generally accepted belief of the 

 early members, to which Mr. Du Ponceau testified, but 

 to which the older Committee, fascinated by the docu- 

 ments discovered and produced by Mr. Fisher, refused 

 to give a really attentive ear. Nothing had been alleged 

 or discovered which seems adequate to offset that tes- 

 timony and that tradition. There is now no centennial 

 celebration to be justified ; the zeal, the partisan sharp- 

 ness of controversy, which was controlled, it is true, by 

 the fine courtesy of those gentlemen whom we are proud 

 to call our predecessors, but which, nevertheless, can 



i The old Committee does not appear to have given sufficient considera- 

 tion to the fact that Franklin's letter to Hugh Roberts (p. 132f) was 

 written by him within eight months after leaving Philadelphia, where he 

 had been, off and on, for two years. If there had then been two Juntos 

 it would have been impossible for him not to know it. Whatever shape 

 the one Junto had assumed, it was regarded by Franklin as Ms Junto. 



