From Benjamin Franklin to George Whatley, 21 August 1784
To George Whatley
Reprinted from The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature, I (1806), 137–8;6 transcript: Library of Congress7
Passy, near Paris, Aug. 21, 1784.
My dear old Friend,
I received your kind letter of May 3,8 1783. I am ashamed that it has been so long unanswered. The indolence of old age, frequent indisposition, and too much business, are my only excuses. I had great pleasure in reading it, as it informed me of your welfare.
Your excellent little work, “The Principles of Trade,” is too little known.9 I wish you would send me a copy of it by the bearer, my grandson and secretary whom I beg leave to recommend to your civilities. I would get it translated and printed here, and if your bookseller has any quantity of them left, I should be glad he would send them to America. The ideas of our people there, though rather better than those that prevail in Europe, are not so good as they should be: and that piece might be of service among them.
Since and soon after the date of your letter, we lost unaccountably as well as unfortunately, that worthy, valuable young man you mention, your namesake Maddeson.1 He was infinitely regretted by all that knew him.
I am sorry your favourite charity does not go on as you could wish it. It is shrunk indeed by your admitting only 60 children in a year.2 What you have told your brethren respecting America is true. If you find it difficult to dispose of your children in England, it looks as if you had too many people. And yet you are afraid of emigration. A subscription is lately set on foot here to encourage and assist mothers in nursing their infants themselves at home; the practice of sending them to the Enfans Trouvés, having risen here to a monstrous excess, as by the annual bills it appears they amount to near one third of the children born in Paris. This subscription is likely to succeed, and may do a great deal of good, though it cannot answer all the purposes of a Foundling Hospital.3
Your eyes must continue very good, since you are able to write so small a hand without spectacles. I cannot distinguish a letter even of large print, but am happy in the invention of double spectacles, which serving for distant objects as well as near ones, make my eyes as useful to me as ever they were.4 If all the other defects and infirmities of old age could be as easily and cheaply remedied, it would be worth while, my friend, to live a good deal longer. But I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitutions as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.— Adieu and believe me ever, Your’s most affectionately,
B. Franklin.
6. This is the first of four letters from BF to Whatley that John Towill Rutt (ODNB) received c. 1794–95 from Whatley’s nephew, a close relation. Rutt’s transcriptions were first published in the Cambridge Intelligencer on Aug. 8, Aug. 22, and Sept. 5, 1795. In November, 1806, Rutt sent another set of transcriptions to the Monthly Repository, which published them one at a time and included Rutt’s cover letter (I, [1806], 136–7) as an introduction to the present text. That same year, slightly different transcriptions appeared in The Complete Works, in Philosophy, Politics, and Morals, of the Late Dr. Benjamin Franklin … (3 vols., London, 1806), III, 543*–56*, with the debt to Rutt acknowledged. All three sets of published transcriptions vary slightly in wording. None of the ALS survive, but a press copy of the third letter (BF to Whatley, May 23, 1785) is available. Based on a comparison of it to the various transcriptions, we determined that the Monthly Repository texts most closely adhere to BF’s originals.
7. The transcript, prepared c. 1817 for WTF, was published in WTF, Memoirs, 11, 68–9. The differences in wording between it and the 1795 and 1806 printings described in the previous note suggest that WTF edited BF’s text. For other examples of WTF’s editorial interventions see XLII, 91n, 361–2n, 365n, 441n.
8. Actually, May 6: XXXIX, 565–7.
9. The second edition of Whatley’s Principles of Trade (1774), issued anonymously, included nine notes contributed by BF that were inserted either verbatim or in edited form. As Whatley wrote in the letter BF is here answering, he had been surprised to see those notes excerpted in a recent collection of BF’s writings (where the editor did not specify the name of the pamphlet’s anonymous author). Whatley claimed to be “flatter’d,” but he would soon insist on showing WTF what BF had given him, as compared with what had been published; see his letter of [before Oct. 26–]Nov. 15. For background on the 1774 pamphlet see XXI, 169–77. (Contrary to what appears there on p. 169, the first edition of this pamphlet was Reflections on the Principle of Trade … [1769]. The incorrect title was taken from Paul L. Ford, Franklin Bibliography … Brooklyn, 1889], p. 149.)
1. See XXXIX, 566. George Maddison died on Aug. 27, 1783: XL, 502n.
2. The London Foundling Hospital: XXXIX, 566.
3. Beaumarchais had earlier in the month initiated a campaign to promote maternal breastfeeding through subsidies for poor working women, with the aim of deterring them from turning their babies over to wet nurses or a foundling hospital. He later arranged for the proceeds of the Oct. 2 performance of the Mariage de Figaro, the fiftieth, to go to the cause. Beaumarchais’ efforts were not embraced in Paris but were so in Lyon: Jour. de Paris, Aug. 4 and 15, 1784; Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, XXVI, 216–17, 240–1; Maurice Lever, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (3 vols., [Paris], 1999–2004), 111, 9–14; Simon Schama, Citizens: a Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), pp. 145–6.
4. It is not known when BF first commissioned a pair of bifocals. Whately and TJ both credited him with the invention; see Whately’s reply, [before Oct. 26–]Nov. 15, 1784, and Charles E. Letocha, “The Invention and Early Manufacture of Bifocals,” Survey of Ophthalmology, XXXV (1990), 226–35. (The TJ letter cited in Appendix 8, p. 235, is misdated; it was written on Nov. 16, 1808.)