SKETCHES NEW AND OLD

by Mark Twain

Part 4.

The late Benjamin Franklin—­[Written about 1870.]

["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well.”—­B.  F.]

This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers.  He was twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of Boston.  These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them worded in accordance with the facts.  The signs are considered well enough to have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out the two birthplaces to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as several times in the same day.  The subject of this memoir was of a vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages.  His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever—­boys who might otherwise have been happy.  It was in this spirit that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers.  With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.  Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal-time—­a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin’s pernicious biography.

His maxims were full of animosity toward boys.  Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin, on the spot.  If he buys two cents’ worth of peanuts, his father says, “Remember what Franklin has said, my son—­’A grout a day’s a penny a year"’; and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts.  If he wants to spin his top when he has done work, his father quotes, “Procrastination is the thief of time.”  If he does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it, because “Virtue is its own reward.”  And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest, because Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights of malignity: 

               Early to bed and early to rise
               Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.

As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.  The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents, experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell.  The legitimate result is my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration.  My parents used to have me up before nine o’clock in the morning sometimes when I was a boy.  If they had let me take my natural rest where would I have been now?  Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.