ression of personal ill will, when
they are compared with the affection and the admiration given to him in
liberal measure by the great mass of mankind both in the generations
which knew him as a living contemporary and in those which hear of him
only as one of the figures of history. It is not worth while to deify
him, or to speak with extravagant reverence, as if he had neither faults
nor limitations. Yet it seems ungracious to recall these concerning one
who did for his fellow men so much as Franklin did. Moral, intellectual,
and material boons he conferred in such abundance that few such
benefactors of the race can be named, though one should survey all the
ages. A man of a greater humanity never lived; and the quality which
stood Abou Ben Adhem in good stead should suffice to save Franklin from
human criticism. He not only loved his kind, but he also trusted them
with an implicit confidence, reassuring if not extraordinary in an
observer of his shrewdness and experience. Democrats of the
revolutionary school in France and of the Jeffersonian school in the
United States have preached an exaggerated gospel of the people, but
their words are the dubious ones of fanatics or politicians. Franklin
was of a different kind, and had a more genuine and more generous faith
in man than the greatest democrat in politics who ever lived.

Franklin's inborn ambition was the noblest of all ambitions: to be of
practical use to the multitude of men. The chief motive of his life was
to promote the welfare of mankind. Every moment which he could snatch
from enforced occupations was devoted to doing, devising, or suggesting
something advantageous more or less generally to men. His detractors
have given a bad, but also a false coloring to this trait. They say that
the spirit of all that he did and taught was sordid, that the motives
and purposes which he set before men were selfish, that his messages
spoken through the mouth of Poor Richard inculcated no higher objects in
life than money-getting. This is an utterly unfair form of stating the
case. Franklin was a great moralist: though he did not believe in the
Christian religion according to the straitlaced orthodox view, he
believed in the virtues which that religion embodies; and he was not
only often a zealous preacher, but in the main a consistent exemplar of
them. Perhaps he did not rest them upon precisely the same basis upon
which the Christian preacher does, but at least he put th