Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: they lose their India commerce, which is one of their present great supports, and one battle at sea, their credit is gone and the power follows. Thus empires by pride, and folly, and extravagance, ruin themselves like individuals. M. La Motte Piquet has snatched from between their teeth a good deal of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: they lose their India commerce, which is one of their present great supports, and one battle at sea, their credit is gone and the power follows. Thus empires by pride, and folly, and extravagance, ruin themselves like individuals. M. La Motte Piquet has snatched from between their teeth a good deal of their West India prey, having taken 22 sail of their homeward bound prizes; one of our American privateers has taken two more, and brought them into Brest; and two were burnt. There were 34 in company, with two men-of-war of the line and two frigates, who saved themselves by flight; but we do not hear of their being yet got in. B. Franklin. TO MR. HODGSON, LONDON. Dear Sir, Passy, April 1, 1781. I am shocked exceedingly at the account you give me of Digges. He that robs the rich even of a single guinea is a villain, but what is he who can break his sacred trust, by robbing a poor man and a prisoner of eighteen-pence given charitably for his relief, and repeat that crime as often as there are weeks in a winter, and multiply it by robbing as many poor men every week as make up the number of near 600? We have no name in our language for such atrocious wickedness. If such a fellow is not damned, 'tis not worth while to keep a devil. EXTRACT OF A LETTER FROM DR. FRANKLIN TO J. JAY, ESQ. Passy, Aug. 20, 1781. Digges, a Maryland merchant residing in London, who pretended to be a zealous American, and to have much concern for our poor people in the English prisons, drew upon me for their relief at different times last winter to the amount of 495?. sterling, which he said had been drawn for upon him by the gentlemen at Portsmouth and Plymouth, who had the care of the distribution. To my utter astonishment, I have since learnt that the villain had not applied above 30/. of...