although the instructions from Congress prescribe, that nothing shall be done without the participation of the king. You are about to hold out a certain hope of peace to America, without even informing yourself on the state of the negotiation on our part. You are wise and discreet, sir; you perfectly understand what is due to propriety; you have all your life performed your duties. I pray you to consider how you propose to fulfill those, which are due to the king! I am not desirous of enlarging these reflections; I commit them to your own integrity. When you shall be pleased to relieve my uncertainty, I will entreat the king to enable me to answer your demands (for money)."

Franklin hastened to mollify the minister; for Congress was still in the utmost extremity of need. "Nothing," he urged, "has been agreed in the preliminaries contrary to the interests of France; and no peace is to take place between us and England, till you have concluded yours. Your observation is, however, apparently just, that, in not consulting you before they were signed, we have been guilty of neglecting a point of bienséance. But, as this was not from want of respect for the king, whom we all love and honor, we hope it will be excused, and that the great work, which has hitherto been so happily conducted, is so nearly brought to perfec tion, and is so glorious to his reign, will not be ruined by a single indiscretion of ours. And certainly the whole edifice sinks to the ground immediately, if you refuse on that account to give us any further assistance. * It is not possible for any one to be more sensible than I am, of what I and every American owe to the king, for the many and great benefits and favors he has bestowed upon us. All my letters to America are proofs of this; all tending to make the same impressions on the minds of my countrymen, that I felt in my own. And I believe that no prince was ever more beloved and respected by his own subjects, than the king is by the people of the United States. The English, I just now learn, flatter themselves they have already divided us. I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a secret, and that they will find themselves totally mistaken."

* *

The money was granted. Congress had asked a loan of twenty millions of francs; but this was beyond the resources of the French treasury at the close of a long war, and only six millions could be spared.

M. de Vergennes gave the French minister at Philadelphia a narrative of the abrupt signing, and of Mr. Adams's neglecting to call upon him. "I think it proper," wrote the Count, "that the most influential members of Congress should be informed of the very irregular conduct of their commissioners in regard to us. You may speak of it not in the tone of complaint. I accuse no person; I blame no one, not even Dr. Franklin. He has yielded too easily to the bias of his colleagues, who do not pretend to recognize the rules of courtesy in regard to us. All their attentions have been taken up by the English whom they have met in Paris. If we may judge of the future from what has passed here under our eyes, we shall be but poorly paid for all that we have done for the United States, and for securing to them a national existence." The conduct of the commissioners, as Mr. Madison reports, was most sharply criticised in Congress, and there was talk even of their recall. Probably some decisive act of censure would have followed, if the news of the general peace, so quickly succeeding, had not banished the recollection of every thing that was not in harmony with the universal joy. Mr. Livingston, however, in his next letter to the commissioners, gave strong expression to his disapprobation of the conduct complained of by the Count de Vergennes. Each of the gentlemen returned a defense of that conduct, which reads plausibly enough. Franklin succeeded, at length, in removing the ill impression from the mind of the French minister, and no bad consequences resulted from the affair.

I do not think Dr. Franklin was to blame for the act of discour tesy to the French minister; for, linked with two such colleagues, it was, perhaps, the best of all the evils in his choice. He must have seen how essential it was to keep Mr. Adams and Mr. Jay apart from the French minister and his secretary-men formed by nature and by education to misunderstand and undervalue one another. It was only a Franklin who could have extricated the peace from such a conjunction of antagonisms.

Mr. Fitzherbert and the Count de Vergennes agreed upon terms on the eighteenth of January, 1783. Two days after, in the Count's office, at Versailles, in the presence of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Adams, the representatives of England, France, and Spain, signed the preliminaries of the general peace. Documents were immediately signed, declaring hostilities suspended. The war was at an end.

The United States, with the assistance of France, had achieved their independence. There was no ceremony observed or emotion expressed on this interesting occasion; the commissioners merely showing their powers, and signing the various documents, in a composed, business-like manner. "Thus," says Mr. Adams, "was this mighty system terminated with as little ceremony, and in as short a time, as a marriage settlement." The Americans went to dine at the Duc de la Rochefoucault's. In that hospitable abo:le, the spell of official etiquette dissolved, and Franklin exclaimed, as he embraced the Duke, "My friend! could I have hoped, at my age, to enjoy such a happiness!"*

In the United States, the articles gave universal satisfaction, and every heart swelled with gratitude and exultation. Contrary to Franklin's prediction, blessings without number were bestowed upon the peace-makers.

The negotiation of the definitive treaty was conducted on the part of England by Mr. David Hartley; Mr. Oswald having retired from public life on the retirement of his patron, Lord Shelburne. From May to September, the commissioners were busy enough. New articles were proposed, discussed, rejected; or, if agreed upon in Paris, rejected in London. Mr. Adams became more suspicious and unmanageable than ever, almost to the point of being “absolutely out of his senses." "One of my colleagues," wrote Franklin, July, 1783, “thinks the French minister one of the greatest enemies of our country; that he would have straitened our boundaries, to prevent the growth of our people; contracted our fishery, to ob struct the increase of our seamen; and retained the royalists among us, to keep us divided; that he privately opposes all our negotiations with foreign courts, and afforded us, during the war, the assistance we received, only to keep it alive, that we might be so much the more weakened by it; that to think of gratitude to France is the greatest of follies, and that to be influenced by it would ruin us. He makes no secret of his having these opinions, expresses them publicly sometimes in presence of the English ministers, and speaks of hundreds of instances which he could produce in proof of them." His jealousy of Dr. Franklin sometimes amounted to a mania. He accused him of arrogating to himself the

*Rochefoucault's Eulogium of Franklin, Paris, June 13, 1790,

+Such passages as the following occur in Mr. Adams's private letters of 1783: To Elbridge Gerry,

power and consequence which belonged to the whole commission, and thought that the Count de Vergennes and Franklin were plotting his ruin, and employing the newspapers of Europe to depreciate his character. He was sorely affronted, too, by the appointment of Franklin's grandson to the secretaryship, and, at first, refused to sigu his commission; but, after holding out many months, he was induced to append his signature. He had the grace, also, to bear voluntary testimony, in two of his public letters, to Dr. Franklin's ability and firmness, as displayed at the crisis of the negotiation in November, 1782.

In a word, nothing could be agreed upon between the American commissioners and the English ministry, save only the preliminary articles signed in 1782. After eight or nine months of fruitless negotiation, those preliminaries were accepted as the definitive treaty, with only the requisite alterations of form. On Wednesday, September 3d, 1783, at Mr. Hartley's apartments at the Hotel de York, in Paris, the definitive treaty between Great Britain and the United States was signed. The treaty between England and France was signed on the same day, at Versailles; the Count de Vergennes making it a point to delay the ceremony until a messenger from Paris brought him the news that the signing of the American treaty had taken place. The treaty was unanimously ratified by Congress, January 14th, 1784; and ratified by the king of England, on the 9th of April; so that, from the beginning of the negotiation to the final ratification, was a period of two years and three months.

Liberal Europe rejoiced. Young Europe began to realize its dream of emigrating to free America. The great movement westward, that has since known but two brief intervals of pause, began. Men of family and fortune, widows seeking chances for their children, young adventurers with small "ventures" of goods or capital, and hosts of poor men who sold their all, or mortgaged April 15th: "John Jay, in his present circumstances, wants, as well as all your faithful ministers, all the support which Congress can give them. You will never have another honest minister trumpeted by the court where he is. Dr. Franklin alone is, and will be, trumpeted by the commis at Versailles, and their tools." To the same, Sept. 3d: "The moment an American minister gives a loose to his passion for women, that moment he is undone; he is instantly at the mercy of the spies of the court, and the tool of the most profligate of the human race. make it a principle that your ministers should be agreeable at the court and have the good word of the courtiers, you are undone. No man will ever be pleasing at a court in general, who is not depraved in his morals or warped from your interest.”

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If you

their labor, to pay their passage, hastened to embark for the land of promise. Among those who did so, I observe, just after the conclusion of the definitive treaty, was a young German from Baden, son of a small farmer, who took out with him to sell on commission a few hundred dollars' worth of musical instruments— John Jacob Astor, founder of the Astor Library in the city of New York.

CHAPTER XVII.

AFTER THE PEACE.

THE definitive treaty signed, Mr. Jay went to England to try the Bath waters, and Mr. Adams soon followed him on a tour of pleasure. Dr. Franklin himself had thoughts of crossing the Channel once more, and dropping in, some Thursday evening, at his old Whig Club at the London Coffee-House, and taking up his quarters, for a while, in Craven street. But the autumn was too far advanced, he thought; and his old friend, the Gout, gave him warning not to venture too far; to say nothing of the severer admonitions of a new acquaintance, the Stone. The completion of the treaty, however, gave him more leisure than he had enjoyed before in France, and his grandson, Ben Bache, a fine lad then of fifteen, came home from his Swiss boarding-school to enliven his heart and home. The boy, he found, had learned something of many languages, but had half forgotten his English.

Twice Dr. Franklin had asked his recall: first, in 1781; the second time, soon after the signing of the preliminaries, in 1782. His first resignation was answered by his being appointed a member of the commission to treat for peace, and by an assurance that when peace was made he should be allowed to retire, if he should then wish to do so. To his second request for recall he had received no answer, though a year had elapsed since he had sent it. Some weeks after the signing of the definitive treaty, he wrote a third resignation, more decided than those previously forwarded. In each of these three letters he called the attention of Congress to the merits and services of William Temple Franklin, and asked