on was one of
some dignity, greatly enhanced by the respect inspired by the ability
with which Franklin filled it, ability which was recognized no less by
the enemies than by the friends of the provinces. It was also a position
of grave responsibility; and it ought to have been one of liberal
emolument, but it was not. The sum of his four salaries should have been
L1200; but only Pennsylvania and New Jersey actually paid him.
Massachusetts would have paid, but the bills making the appropriations
were obstinately vetoed by the royalist governor.[26]

[Note 26: Franklin's _Works_, iv. 88.]

Yet this matter of income was important to him, and it was at no slight
personal sacrifice that he was now serving his country. He had a
moderate competence, but his expenses were almost doubled by living thus
apart from his family, while his affairs suffered by reason of his
absence. For a while he was left unmolested in the post-mastership, and
in view of all the circumstances it must be confessed that the ministry
behaved very well to him in this particular. Rumors which occasionally
reached his ears made him uncomfortably aware how precarious his tenure
of this position really was. His prolonged absence certainly gave an
abundantly fair pretext for his removal; still advantage was not taken
of it. Some of his enemies, as he wrote in December, 1770, by plentiful
abuse endeavored to provoke him to resign; but they found him sadly
"deficient in that Christian virtue of resignation." It was not until
1774, after the episode of the Hutchinson letters and the famous hearing
before the privy council, that he was actually displaced. If this
forbearance of the ministry was attributable to magnanimity, it stands
out in prominent inconsistence with the general course of official life
in England at that time. Probably no great injustice would be done in
suggesting a baser motive. The ministry doubtless aimed at one or both
of two things: to keep a certain personal hold upon him, which might,
insensibly to himself, mollify his actions; and to discredit him among
his countrymen by precisely such fleers as had been cast against him in
the Massachusetts Assembly. More than once they sought to seduce him by
offers of office; it was said that he could have been an under-secretary
of state, had he been willing to qualify himself for the position by
modifying his views on colonial questions. More than once, too, gossip
circulated in America that some