Full text: Essays of Benjamin Franklin

INTRODUCTION 
Benjamin Franklin has been called the ‘Typical 
American”; but it would be more accurate to say 
that he was the only American whose personality 
filled out the requirements of the Franklin type. No 
other American, and no other man on either side of 
the Atlantic, possessed anything approaching Frank- 
lin’s range of knowledge in so many channels, or the 
standard of his practical wisdom, his experience, his 
humor, and his common sense. 
Franklin's career, comprising in all eighty-four 
years, covered experience and service as a printer, 
an essayist, a man of science, a teacher, a diplomatist 
of very high order, a philosopher, and a public- 
spirited citizen who did much to further the develop- 
ment of his generation. 
Under various emergencies and demands, Franklin 
gave evidence of courage of a very high type. The 
record of Franklin's action in presenting to the British 
Parliament the just demands of Americans who were 
claiming equal rights with other English-speaking 
citizens of the great British Commonwealth, and the 
picture of Franklin standing before that same Parlia- 
ment as representative of these transatlantic English- 
speaking peoples, and accepting with unperturbed 
countenance the stream of abusive invective that 
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