all abated their commendation of him have challenged him on the
side where he might most willingly have been supposed to err, that of an
excess of leniency. As to the class of men with whom he deals generally
in his introductory essay, and individually in the elaborate
biographical sketches which follow, the same difficulty presents itself
which is encountered in all attempts to canvass the faults or the
characteristics of any body of men who bear a common party-name or share
a common opinion, while in the staple of real virtue or vice, of honor
or baseness, of sincerity or hypocrisy, they may represent the poles of
difference. The contemporary estimate of the Tories, and in large part
the treatment of them which was thought to be just, were, in the main,
adjusted with reference to the meanest and most malignant portion. Mr.
Sabine, while by no means espousing the championship even of the best of
them, would have the whole body judged with the candor which comes of
looking at their general fellowship in the light of its natural
prejudices, prepossessions, and embarrassments. It is to be considered
also that the best of the class were a sort of warrant for the worst.

Those who are tolerably well read in the biographies and histories of
our Revolutionary period are aware that Dr. Franklin, who, about most
exciting and passion-stirring subjects, was a man of remarkably moderate
and tolerant spirit, was eminently a hater of the Tories, unrelenting in
his animosity towards them, and sternly set against all the measures
proposed at the Peace for their relief, either by the British Government
to enforce our remuneration of their losses, or by our own General or
State Governments to soften the penalties visited upon them. The origin
and the explanation of this intense feeling of animosity toward the
Loyalists in the breast of that philosopher of moderation are easily
traced to one of the most interesting incidents in his residence near
the British Court as agent for Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. The
incident is connected with the still unexplained mystery of his getting
possession of the famous letters of Hutchinson, Oliver, etc. Franklin
was living and directing all his practical efforts for enlightening and
influencing those whom he supposed to be simply the ignorant plotters of
mischief against the Colonists, under the full and most confident belief
that those plotters were merely the stupid and conceited members of the
B