scarce pass unobserved." This
reference to the malicious and untrustworthy back-biter, Arthur Lee,
might have been much more severe, and still amply deserved. The most
important acts of his ignoble life, by which alone his memory is
preserved, were the slanders which he set in circulation concerning
Franklin. Yet Franklin, little suspicious and very magnanimous, praised
him as a "gentleman of parts and ability," likely to serve the province
with zeal and activity. Probably from this impure Lee fount, but
possibly from some other source, there now came a renewal of the rumors
that Franklin was to be gained over to the ministerial side by
promotion to some office superior to that which he had held. The
injurious story was told in Boston, where perhaps a few persons believed
it to be true of a man who in fact could hardly have set upon his fealty
a price so high that the British government would not gladly have paid
it, and who heretofore had been, and at this very time again was,
tempted by repeated solicitations and the intimations of grand rewards,
only to change his mind--a matter so very easy in politics.

Furthermore, beyond these assaults upon his fidelity, these insults of
the privy council, Franklin had to contemplate the possibility of
personal danger. He was a man of abundant courage, but courage does not
make a prison or a gallows an agreeable object in one's horizon. The
newspapers alleged that in his correspondence "treason" had been
discovered. The ministry, as he was directly informed, thought no better
of him than did the editors, regarding him as "the great fomenter of the
opposition in America," the "great adversary to any accommodation." "It
is given out," he wrote, "that copies of several letters of mine to you
are sent over here to the ministers, and that their contents are
treasonable, for which I should be prosecuted if copies could be made
evidence." He was not conscious of any treasonable intention, but
treason was a word to make a man anxious in those days, when uttered by
the ministry and echoed by the court. Franklin was quite aware that,
though ministers might offer him a tempting place by way of bribe, they
would far rather give him "a place in a cart to Tyburn." His friends
warned him that his situation was hazardous; that, "if by some accident
the troops and the people of New England should come to blows," he would
doubtless be seized; and they advised him to withdraw while yet he could
do