FRANKLIN 

 AS STATESMAN AND DIPLOMATIST 



By Joseph Hodges Choate, LL.D., D.C.L. 



[Address delivered in The American Academy of Music, Friday, April 20] 



TO attempt to portray Fraklin as statesman and 

 diplomatist in forty minutes is like trying to write 

 on the palm of your hand the history of the eighteenth 

 century, of which he was so important a part. From 

 the time when he began organizing the civic life of 

 Philadelphia, and making it the model city of the con- 

 tinent, until sixty years afterwards, when upon his death 

 bed and in immediate expectation of death, he signed 

 the Memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery, 

 " that it would be pleased to countenance the restora- 

 tion of liberty to those unhappy men who alone in this 

 land of freedom are degraded into perpetual bondage, 

 and who amidst the general joy of surrounding freedom 

 are groaning in servile subjection," he was always the 

 statesman, and generally quite in advance of his times. 

 From 1757, when he visited London to test the question 

 whether the State of Pennsylvania, with its two hundred 

 thousand inhabitants, was the property of the descen- 

 dants of William Penn, or belonged to its own citizens, 



(71) 



