estruction, enjoys honour and power, and is actually seated in
the tribunal where they punish my misfortune with rods and with infamy?
Who was that barbarous lawgiver who, deciding between the two sexes,
kept all his wrath for the weaker; for that luckless sex which pays for
a single pleasure by a thousand dangers,"--and so forth. It need hardly
be said that this is far too much in the vein, and almost in the words
of Diderot, to have any authenticity. And as it happens, there is a
piece of external evidence on the matter, which illustrates Raynal's
curious lightheartedness as to historic veracity. Franklin and Silas
Deane were one day talking together about the many blunders in Raynal's
book, when the author himself happened to step in. They told him of what
they had been speaking. "Nay," says Raynal, "I took the greatest care
not to insert a single fact for which I had not the most unquestionable
authority." Deane then fell on the story of Polly Baker, and declared of
his own certain knowledge that there had never been a law against
bastardy in Massachusetts. Raynal persisted that he must have had the
whole case from some source of indisputable trustworthiness, until
Franklin broke in upon him with a loud laugh, and explained that when he
was a printer of a newspaper, they were sometimes short of news, and to
amuse his customers he invented fictions that were as welcome to them as
facts. One of these fictions was the legend of Raynal's heroine. The
abbe was not in the least disconcerted. "Very well, Doctor," he replied,
"I would rather relate your stories than other men's truths."[169]

[168] Book xvii.

[169] Jefferson, quoted in Parton's _Life of Franklin_, ii. 418.

When all has been said that need be said about the glaring shortcomings
of the _History of the Indies_, its popularity still remains to be
accounted for. If we ask for the causes of this striking success, they
are perhaps not very far to seek. For one thing, the book is remarkable
both for its variety and its animation. Horace Walpole wrote about it to
Lady Aylesbury in terms that do not at all overstate its liveliness: "It
tells one everything in the world; how to make conquests, invasions,
blunders, settlements, bankruptcies, fortunes, etc.; tells you the
natural and historical history of all nations; talks commerce,
navigation, tea, coffee, china, mines, salt, spices; of the Portuguese,
English, French, Dutch, Danes, Spaniards, Arabs, carava