Franklin
in his bed. At times when his dreadful suffering seemed to become
intolerable, it was quelled, so far as possible, by opium. But at
intervals it left him, and still whenever he thus got a respite for a
few days he was again at work. It was in such an interval that he wrote
his paper condemning the liberty, which was becoming the license, of the
press. If the law permitted this sort of thing, he said, then it should
restore also the liberty of the cudgel. The paper is not altogether
antiquated, nor the idea altogether bad!

It was even so late as March 23, 1790, that he wrote the humorous
rejoinder to the pro-slavery speech delivered in Congress by Jackson of
Georgia. But the end was close at hand; and when this brilliant satire
was composed, there lacked but a few days of the allotted term when that
rare humor was to be stilled forever, and that broad philanthropy was to
cease from the toil in which it had never tired alike for the free and
the oppressed.

On April 12, 1790, a pain in the chest and difficulty of breathing,
which had been giving him much trouble, ceased for a short while, and he
insisted upon getting up in order to have his bed re-made; for he wished
to "die in a decent manner." His daughter expressed the conventional
wish that he might yet recover and live many years. "I hope not," he
replied. Soon afterward the pain returned, and he was advised to change
his position, so that he could breathe more easily. "A dying man can do
nothing easy," he said; and these are the last words which he is known
to have uttered. Soon afterward he sank into a lethargy, and so remained
until at eleven o'clock, P. M., on April 17, 1790, he died.

A great procession and a concourse of citizens escorted his funeral, and
Congress voted to "wear the customary badge of mourning for one month."
The bits of crape were all very well, a conventional, insignificant
tribute; but unfortunately the account of the country, or at least of
Congress as representing the country, did not stand very honorably, to
say nothing of generously, with one of its oldest, most faithful, and
most useful servants.[103] Again and again Franklin had asked for some
modest office, some slight opening, for his grandson, Temple Franklin.
The young man's plans and prospects in life had all been sacrificed to
the service of Franklin as his secretary, which was in fact the service
of the country; yet he had never been able to collect even the ordinary