The Junto led to the establishment, by Franklin, of the Philadelphia Public Library, which became the parent of all public libraries in America.  He also organized and equipped a fire-company; paved and lighted the streets of Philadelphia; established a high school and an academy for the study of English branches; founded the Philadelphia Public Hospital; invented the toggle-joint printing-press, the Franklin Stove, and various other useful mechanical devices.

After his retirement from business, Franklin enjoyed seven years of what he called leisure, but they were years of study and application; years of happiness and sweet content, but years of aspiration and an earnest looking into the future.  His experiments with kite and key had made his name known in all the scientific circles of Europe, and his suggestive writings on the subject of electricity had caused Goethe to lay down his pen and go to rubbing amber for the edification of all Weimar.

Franklin was in correspondence with the greatest minds of Europe, and what his “Poor Richard Almanac” had done for the plain people of America, his pamphlets were now doing for the philosophers of the Old World.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-four, he wrote a treatise showing the Colonies that they must be united, and this was the first public word that was to grow and crystallize and become the United States of America.  Before that, the Colonies were simply single, independent, jealous and bickering overgrown clans.  Franklin showed for the first time that they must unite in mutual aims.

In Seventeen Hundred Fifty-seven, matters were getting a little strained between the Province of Pennsylvania and England.  “The lawmakers of England do not understand us—­some one should go there as an authorized agent to plead our cause,” and Franklin was at once chosen as the man of strongest personality and soundest sense.  So Franklin went to England and remained there for five years as agent for the Colonies.

He then returned home, but after two years the Stamp Act had stirred up the public temper to a degree that made revolution imminent, and Franklin again went to England to plead for justice.  The record of the ten years he now spent in London is told by Bancroft in a hundred pages.  Bancroft is very good, and! have no desire to rival him, so suffice it to say that Franklin did all that any man could have done to avert the coming War of the Revolution.  Burke has said that when he appeared before Parliament to be examined as to the condition of things in America, it was like a lot of schoolboys interrogating the master.

With the voice and tongue of a prophet, Franklin foretold the English people what the outcome of their treatment of America would be.  Pitt and a few others knew the greatness of Franklin, and saw that he was right, but the rest smiled in derision.

He sailed for home in Seventeen Hundred Seventy-five, and urged the Continental Congress to the Declaration of Independence, of which he became a signer.  Then the war came, and had not Franklin gone to Paris and made an ally of France, and borrowed money, the Continental Army could not have been maintained in the field.