142 ROSENGARTEN—AMERICAN HISTORY. [April 6, 
This pretended letter of Count de Schaumburg is dated Rome, 
February 18, 1777, but is not printed in Sparks, or any vf the 
authorized editions of Franklin’s works. It still remains a question 
of when and where and how it was first printed and published,— 
it does not appear in Ford’s Franklin Bibliography, which prints 
most of Franklin’s clever jeux d’ esprit that were printed on his 
press at Passy and soon found their way into print in Europe and 
America, but Ford printed it in his Wany-Sided Franklin, p. 244; 
Bigelow says it appears in a French version in Lescure Correspond- 
ence inédite secréte sur Louis XVI (Vol. i, p. 31), Paris, but 
with no allusion to Franklin. No copy of it is found in the Amer- 
ican Philosophical Society’s collection of the imprints of the Passy 
Press, although Ford accepts Sparks’ and Bigelow’s attribution of 
the authorship to Franklin, and the internal evidence fully confirms 
the statement ; it would be of interest to fix the time and place of 
its first publication, its fortune in being virulently attacked, and its 
use in exciting justifiable indignation against the Hessian princes 
who shared, with other German petty sovereigns, in the sale of sub- 
jects to fight under a foreign flag in a war which, as Frederick the 
Great said, was none of their business,—for these things have given 
it a value and importance far beyond the other satirical letters 
produced by Franklin at his busy Passy Press. 
Bancroft tells us that Frederick the Great encouraged France to 
enter into the alliance with America—a counter stroke of vast im- 
portance, far outweighing in its advantages for the struggling young 
republic any benefit gained for Great Britain by its costly pur- 
chase of German soldiers. His hostility to England, however, did 
not lead him to fulfill his implied promise to join France in its 
active and substantial support of the Americans—no doubt rebellion 
and independence were more than he could encourage, little as he 
liked the British effort to crush them. It is curious that Lowell 
should speak of Franklin’s smart satire as a clumsy forgery. Kapp, 
in his So/datenhande/ (Berlin, 1864), prints the letter in the Appen- 
dix 29, on p. 267, from Vol. No. 600 of the pamphlets in the 
Library of the Historical Society of New York, and described as. 
printed on six octavo pages, without place of publication, but in 
very large type. He reproduces the original French with all its 
typographical mistakes ; he prints on pp. 196-7 of his book a Ger- 
man version of the letter, and speaks of it as one of a flood of 
pamphlets, of which a very characteristic example was Mirabeau’s. 
