Excerpt from A Recall of Benjamin Franklin: Delivered at Lancaster, Pa;, On June 12, 1912, Before Theta Chapter of Pennsylvania of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in Connection With Franklin and Marshall College

N o man's life can be really known without a just estimate of the influence upon it of those potent factors, heredity and environment. As seed, soil and sunshine are to plant life, so in human life we find in heredity the seed, and in environ ment the soil and sunshine that determine the fruitage. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, I think, who said: The educa tion of a child begins two hundred and fifty years before it is born. It follows, therefore, that he who takes the mere inci dent of Franklin's New England birth as the keynote of his life has omitted from his data the factors of a just estimate. The truth is that Franklin was neither a Massachusetts nor a Pennsylvania man. He was essentially a Briton, but a Briton modified by colonial environment. In a letter addressed to Lord Kames, in the early sixties, he himself says: No man can more sincerely rejoice than I do on the reduction of Canada; and this is not merely as I am a colonist but as I am a Briton.' I have long been of opinion that the foundations of the future grandeur and stability of the British Empire lie in America.

Josiah Franklin, the father of Benjamin, was an English man, who emigrated to America at mature age and it is an interesting fact to know that within a few miles of where George Washington's ancestors lived in England the Frank lins also dwelt. Here for generations, father and son, Frank lin after Franklin, had been blacksmiths. Have you ever thought what a seventeenth century roadside smith was in England? Let me tell you. He was the best posted man in all his country as to what the other counties of England were and what they were doing. Though his shop might be modest.

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