improvement carries us back to the early
leathern-apron days of the Junto. Books were a rare commodity among the
frugal members of that club, and for a while they increased their
resources by keeping all their volumes together in the club room for
common use. But this plan proving hardly feasible, Franklin in the year
1731 drew up proposals for a city library. His method of arousing
public interest in the scheme was one to which he always had recourse
on such occasions, and is a credit to his modesty as well as to his
shrewdness. "I put myself," he says, "as much as I could out of sight,
and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me
to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading."
He succeeded, as he always did in his projects, and the library, still
an honored institution of Philadelphia, is the parent of all the
subscription libraries of the country.

Through the aid of the Junto, also, Franklin set in motion another
project. As a boy he had seen the first fire company started in Boston,
and now that his Quaker home had grown to be a thriving city, he
undertook to introduce the same system there. No doubt many of our
readers have seen the curious relics of these colonial fire
companies,--old leathern buckets stamped with various devices and with
the owner's name, which were used to pass water rapidly from hand to
hand. The companies had a social as well as a useful aim, so that
families were proud to preserve such memorials of the old days.

Owing to the wretched system in vogue, the night watch of the city had
fallen into a deplorable state, the watchmen consisting of a set of
ragamuffins who passed their nights in tippling and left the town to
take care of itself. To remedy this evil Franklin made use of the Junto
and of his paper, "The Gazette," and once more his efforts were
successful.

It seemed, indeed, as if there were no limits to his activity. At
different times he bent his energies to getting the streets paved, to
improving the lighting of the city, to introducing various novelties in
agriculture, and to assisting other projects, such as the establishment
of the Pennsylvania hospital. More important, perhaps, than these was
the founding of the academy which has since developed into the
University of Pennsylvania. As early as 1743 we find Franklin
regretting that there was no convenient college where he might send his
son to be educated; and in 1749 he took u