EXULTATION OF FRANCE AT OUR DISASTERS IN AMERICA—­FRANKLIN—­NECKER—­CHATTERTON.

TO THE REV.  WILLIAM COLE.

STRAWBERRY HILL, June 3, 1778.

I will not dispute with you, dear Sir, on patriots and politics.  One point is past controversy, that the Ministers have ruined this country; and if the Church of England is satisfied with being reconciled to the Church of Rome, and thinks it a compensation for the loss of America and all credit in Europe, she is as silly an old woman as any granny in an almshouse.  France is very glad we have grown such fools, and soon saw that the Presbyterian Dr. Franklin[1] had more sense than our Ministers together.  She has got over all her prejudices, has expelled the Jesuits, and made the Protestant Swiss, Necker,[2] her Comptroller-general.  It is a little woful, that we are relapsing into the nonsense the rest of Europe is shaking off! and it is more deplorable, as we know by repeated experience, that this country has always been disgraced by Tory administrations.  The rubric is the only gainer by them in a few martyrs.

[Footnote 1:  Dr. Franklin, as a man of science, may almost be called the father of electrical science.  He was the discoverer of the electrical character of lightning, a discovery which he followed up by the invention of iron conductors for the protection of buildings, &c., from lightning.  He was also a very zealous politician, and one of the leaders of the American colonists in their resistance to the taxation imposed first by Mr. Grenville and afterwards by Mr. C. Townshend.  He resided for several years in England as agent for the State of Pennsylvania, and in that character, in the year 1765, was examined before the Committee of the House of Commons on the Stamp Act of Mr. Grenville.  After the civil war broke out he was elected a member of the American Congress, and was sent as an envoy to France to negotiate a treaty with that country.  As early as 1758 he was elected a member of the Royal Society in England, and received the honorary degree of D.C.L. from the University of Oxford.]

[Footnote 2:  Necker was originally a banker, in which business he made a large fortune; but after a time he turned his attention to politics.  He began by opposing the financial and constitutional schemes of the great Turgot, and shortly after the dismissal of that Minister he himself was admitted into the Ministry as a sort of Secretary to the Treasury, his religion, as a Protestant, being a bar to his receiving the title of “Comptroller-General,” though, in fact, he had the entire management of the finance of the kingdom, which, by artful misrepresentation of his measures and suppression of such important facts, that he had contracted loans to the amount of twenty millions of money, he represented as far more flourishing than in reality it was.  At the end of two or three years he resigned his office in discontent at his services not receiving the rewards