and anxiety in behalf of this same "honor of Congress,"
which otherwise would soon have been basely discredited; for that body
itself was superbly indifferent on the subject, and did not pretend to
keep faith even with its own agents.

Thus matters continued to the end. Congress pledged itself not to draw
bills, and immediately drew them in batches. Jay could report to
Franklin only scant and reluctant promises won from the Spanish court;
and small as these engagements were, they were ill kept. Perhaps they
could not be kept; for, as Jay wrote, there was "little coin in Egypt,"
the country was really poor. So the end of it always was that Franklin
remained as the only resource for payments, to be made week after week,
of all sorts of sums ranging from little bills upon vessels up to great
totals of $150,000 or $230,000 upon bankers' demands. Such was the
burden of a song which had many more woeful stanzas than can be repeated
here.

By way of affording some sort of encouragement to the French court,
Franklin now proposed that the United States government should furnish
the French fleet and forces in the States with provisions, of which the
cost could be offset, to the small extent that it would go, against
French loans. It seemed a satisfactory arrangement, and France assented
to it.

At the same time he wrote to Adams that he had "long been humiliated
with the idea of our running about from court to court begging for money
and friendship, which are the more withheld the more eagerly they are
solicited, and would perhaps have been offered if they had not been
asked. The proverb says, God helps them that help themselves; and the
world too, in this sense, is very godly." This was an idea to which he
more than once recurred. In March, 1782, in the course of a long letter
to Livingston, he said: "A small increase of industry in every American,
male and female, with a small diminution of luxury, would produce a sum
far superior to all we can hope to beg or borrow from all our friends in
Europe." He reiterated the same views again in March, and again in
December, and doubtless much oftener.[70] No man was more earnest in the
doctrine that every individual American owed his strenuous and
unremitting personal assistance to the cause. It was a practical as well
as a noble patriotism which he felt, preached, and exemplified; and it
was thoroughly characteristic of the man.

[Note 70: Franklin's _Works_, vii. 404; viii. 236.]