The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 1. Бенджамин Франклин

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      PREFACE

      THE addition of another to the already numerous collections of Franklin’s works requires some explanation.

      Though a voluminous writer and one of the great masters of English expression, Franklin wrote habitually with a single eye to immediate practical results. He never posed for posterity. Of all the writings to which he mainly owes his present fame, it would be difficult to name one which he gave to the press himself or of which he saw the proofs. Yet he never wrote a dull line nor many which a century of time has robbed of their interest or value. Whatever he wrote seems to have been conceived upon a scale which embraced the whole human race as well as the individual or class to whom it was specifically addressed, the one evidence of true greatness which never deceives nor misleads. If he wrote to his wife, it was more or less a letter from every husband to his wife; if to his daughter, it was a letter that any daughter would be pleased to receive from her father; if to a philosopher or a statesman, there was always that in the manner and the matter of it which time cannot stale, and which will be read by every statesman and philosopher with the sort of interest they would have felt had it been addressed personally to them.

      In proportion to Franklin’s apparent indifference to posthumous fame, has been the zeal with which the products of his pen have been hunted down and gathered in from all the corners of the earth and new precautions taken to guard them from the depredations of time.

      The first collection made of any of Franklin’s writings we owe to his faithful and accomplished friend, Peter Collinson. ^{Ref. 002} It consisted of letters he had received from Franklin from time to time on electricity, and made only a moderate-sized pamphlet, and was sold for half a crown. ^{Ref. 003} It was enlarged in 1752 by the addition of another communication on the same subject, and again in 1754, and, by subsequent additions of letters and papers on various philosophical subjects it amounted in 1766 to a quarto volume of five hundred pages. The first edition of these papers was given to the public without the author’s knowledge, the editor assigning as his excuse for the liberty he had taken, their extreme importance. They went through at least a half dozen editions before they began to be reprinted in more comprehensive collections, and were promptly translated into the Latin, Italian, French, and German languages.

      In 1779 a collection of Franklin’s writings, which, with a very few exceptions, were not included in Collinson’s collection, was published under the editorial supervision of Mr. Benjamin Vaughan, ^{Ref. 004} who for a period of more than thirty years, and until separated by death, was one of Franklin’s most devoted friends and valued correspondents.

      In the preface to this edition Mr. Vaughan says: