2 Benjamin Franklin [1781 
to become the terror of Europe,* and to exercise with 
impunity that insolence which is so natural to their 
nation, and which will increase enormously with the 
increase of their power. I am, with great respect, 
your Excellency’s, etc., 
B. FRANKLIN, 
1 At a dinner given in Paris by the late Sir Henry Bulwer a few days 
after the news reached Europe of the surrender of Lee in 1865, Sir 
Henry’s brother, the late Lord Lytton, confessed to considerable 
disappointment that the war had terminated without a dismember- 
ment of the Union. He had hoped, he said, that it would have left 
two or three nations instead of one, for, he added, ‘by the close of the 
century you will number near a hundred million, and you will be a 
terror to Europe,” using singularly enough the very expression employed 
here by Franklin in forecasting the danger to the Old World of allowing 
the colonies to remain dependencies of England. 
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