t way of
celebrating the great event was by sending to his wife "a new gown,"
with the message, referring, of course, to the anti-importation league:
that he did not send it sooner, because he knew that she would not like
to be finer than her neighbors, unless in a gown of her own spinning.

[Note 25: Parton's _Life of Franklin_, i. 481.]

No American will find it difficult to conceive the utter ignorance
concerning the colonies which then prevailed in England; about their
trade, manufactures, cultivated products, natural resources, about the
occupations, habits, manners, and ideas of their people, not much more
was known than Americans now know concerning the boers of Cape Colony or
the settlers of New Zealand. In his examination before the Commons, in
many papers which he printed, by his correspondence, and by his
conversation in all the various companies which he frequented, Franklin
exerted himself with untiring industry to shed some rays into this
darkness. At times the comical stories which he heard about his country
touched his sense of humor, with the happy result that he would throw
off some droll bit of writing for a newspaper, which would delight the
friends of America and make its opponents feel very silly even while
they could not help laughing at his wit. A good one of these was the
paper in which he replied, among other things, to the absurd supposition
that the Americans could not make their own cloth, because American
sheep had little wool, and that little of poor quality: "Dear sir, do
not let us suffer ourselves to be amused with such groundless
objections. The very tails of the American sheep are so laden with wool
that each has a little car or wagon on four little wheels to support and
keep it from trailing on the ground. Would they caulk their ships, would
they even litter their horses, with wool, if it were not both plenty and
cheap? And what signifies the dearness of labor when an English shilling
passes for five and twenty?" and so on. It is pleasant to think that
then, as now, many a sober Britisher, with no idea that a satirical jest
at his own expense was hidden away in this extravagance, took it all for
genuine earnest, and was sadly puzzled at a condition of things so far
removed from his own experience.

Very droll is the account of how nearly a party of clever Englishmen
were taken in by the paper which purported to advance the claim of the
king of Prussia to hold England as a German pr