the House of
Commons, and found himself, as he says, "much disgusted, from the
ministerial side, by many base reflections on American courage,
religion, understanding, etc., in which we were treated with the utmost
contempt, as the lowest of mankind, and almost of a different species
from the English of Britain; but particularly the American honesty was
abused by some of the lords, who asserted that we were all knaves, etc."
Franklin went home "somewhat irritated and heated," and before he had
cooled he wrote a paper which he hastened to show to his friend Mr.
Thomas Walpole, a member of the House of Commons. Mr. Walpole "looked at
it and at me several times alternately, as if he apprehended me a little
out of my senses." Nor would Mr. Walpole have been altogether without
reason, if in fact he entertained such a suspicion. The paper was the
memorial of Benjamin Franklin to the Earl of Dartmouth, secretary of
state. In its first clause it demanded "reparation" for the injury done
by the blockade of the port of Boston. Conventional forms of speech were
observed, yet there was an atmosphere almost of injurious insolence,
entirely foreign to all other productions of Franklin's brain and pen.
Its second paragraph recited that the conquests made in the northeast
from France, which included all those extensive fisheries which still
survive as a bone of contention between the two countries, had been
_jointly_ won by England and the American colonies, at their common
cost, and by an army in which the provincial troops were nearly equal in
numbers to the British. "It follows," the audacious memorialist said,
"that the colonies have an equitable and just right to participate in
the advantage of those fisheries," and the present English attempt to
deprive the Massachusetts people of sharing in them was "an act highly
unjust and injurious." He concluded: "I give notice that satisfaction
will probably one day be demanded for all the injury that may be done
and suffered in the execution of such act; and that the injustice of
the proceeding is likely to give such umbrage to _all the colonies_ that
in no future war, wherein other conquests may be meditated, either a man
or a shilling will be obtained from any of them to aid such conquests,
till full satisfaction be made as aforesaid."

Here was indeed a fulmination to strike an Englishman breathless and
dumb with amazement. It put the colonies in the position of a coequal or
allied pow