tate,--the surveyed waste lands, however, to be assessed at the
usual rate. For his success the Penns and their partisans never
forgave him, and his fellow colonists never forgot him.

Franklin returned to Philadelphia in 1762, but not to remain. The
question of taxing the colonies without representation was soon thrust
upon them in the shape of a stamp duty, and Franklin was sent out
again to urge its repeal. He reached London in November 1764, where he
remained the next eleven years and until it became apparent that the
surrender of the right to arbitrarily tax the colonies would never be
made by England during the life of the reigning sovereign, George III.
Satisfied that his usefulness in England was at an end, he sailed for
Philadelphia on the 21st of March, 1775; and on the morning of his
arrival was elected by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a delegate to the
Continental Congress which consolidated the armies of the colonies,
placed General George Washington in command of them, issued the first
Continental currency, and assumed the responsibility of resisting the
imperial government; his last hope of maintaining the integrity of the
empire having been dissipated by recent collisions between the people
and the royalist troops at Concord and Lexington. Franklin served on
ten committees in this Congress. He was one of the five who drew up
the Declaration of Independence in July 1776, and in September
following was chosen unanimously as one of the three commissioners to
be sent out to solicit for the infant republic the aid of France and
the sympathies of continental Europe. In this mission, the importance
of which to his country can hardly be exaggerated, he was greatly
favored by the reputation which had preceded him as a man of science.
While yet a journalist he had made some experiments in electricity,
which established its identity with lightning. The publication by an
English correspondent of the letters in which he gave an account of
these experiments, secured his election as an honorary member of the
Royal Society of London and undisputed rank among the most eminent
natural philosophers of his time. When he arrived in Paris, therefore,
he was already a member of every important learned society in Europe,
one of the managers of the Royal Society of London, and one of the
eight foreign members of the Royal Academy in Paris, where three
editions of his scientific writings had already been printed. To these
advantag