v Introduction 
the absurdity of the belief that communities through- 
out the world could grow rich by building up barriers 
to interfere with the exchange of goods and to hamper 
trade relations. He attempted in fact to put into 
the Constitution a provision providing for unquali- 
fied free trade. He held, as free traders hold today, 
that the authority of the national government should 
be applied only for the protection of the state, for 
the maintaining of justice within its own territory, 
and the fulfilment of obligations outside of the ter- 
ritory. The power to take money from the citizens 
should be utilized only for such matters as be- 
longed to legitimate governmental purposes. Frank- 
lin held that it was contrary to the principles of the 
Constitution, under which American citizens were to 
have equal rights, to tax nine-tenths of those citizens 
for the benefit of the other tenth. It was due to 
Franklin's influence that the tariff barriers, which 
had interfered with the development of trade be- 
tween the colonies, were not permitted to remain 
when those colonies became states. 
Franklin’s mind worked with a full measure of 
imagination, but the imagination was always re- 
strained by judgment, and its operation was based 
upon experiment. His discovery of the relation of 
the identity of lightning with electricity foreshadowed 
the long series of developments in the knowledge of 
electricity which tells us today that the electron, or 
combination of electric power, is itself the basic form 
of all that which we call “matter.” 
Franklin's interest in the larger problems of science 
did not prevent him from rendering practical service 
1