I cannot conclude this chapter without making a remark which the reader has perhaps anticipated--that it was by this simple regimen, vegetables and water, that the Jewish seer, the holy Daniel, while a youth, was of PROVIDENCE made fit for all the learning of the East; hence arose his bright visions into futurity, and his clear pointings to the far distant days of the Messiah, when the four great brass and iron monarchies of Media, Persia, Grecia, and Rome, being overthrown, Christ should set up his last golden monarchy of LOVE, which, though faint in the beginning as the first beam of the uncertain dawn, shall yet at length brighten all the skies, and chase the accursed clouds of sin and suffering from the abodes of man and beast.
In like manner, it was on the simple regimen of vegetables and water, the easy purchase of three cents a day, that the same PROVIDENCE raised up our young countryman to guard the last spark of perfect liberty in the British colonies of North America. Yes, it was on three cents' worth of daily bread and water, that young Ben Franklin commenced his collection of that blaze of light, which early as 1754, showed the infant and unsuspecting colonies their RIGHTS and their DANGERS--and which afterwards, in 1764, blasted the treasonable stamp act--and finally, in '73 and '74, served as the famed star of the East, to guide Washington and his wise men of the revolution, to the cradle of liberty, struggling in the gripe of the British Herod, lord North. There rose the battle of God for an injured people; there spread the star-spangled banner of freedom; and there poured the blood of the brave, fighting for the rights of man under the last republic. O that God may long preserve this precious vine of his own right hand planting, for his own glory and the happiness of unborn millions!
But the reader must not conclude that Ben, through life, tied himself up to a vegetable diet. No. Nature will have her way. And having designed man partly carnivorous, as his canine teeth, his lengthened bowels, and his flesh-pot appetites all evince, she will bring him back to the healthy mixture of animal food with vegetable, or punish his obstinacy with diarrhoea and debility. But she had no great difficulty in bringing Ben back to the use of animal food. According to his own account, no nosegay was ever more fragrant to his olfactories than was the smell of fresh fish in the frying pan. And as to his objection to such a savory diet on account of its stupifying effects on the brain, he easily got the better of that, when he reflected that the witty queen Elizabeth breakfasted on beef-stake; that sir Isaac Newton dined on pheasants; that Horace supped on fat bacon; and that Pope both breakfasted, dined, and supped on shrimps and oysters. And for the objection taken from the cruelty of killing innocent animals, for their flesh, he got over that by the following curious accident:--On his first voyage to New-York, the vessel halting on the coast for lack of breeze, the sailors all fell to fishing for cod, of which they presently took great numbers and very fine. Instead of being delighted at this sight, Ben appeared much hurt, and began to preach to the crew on their "injustice," as he called it, in thus taking away the lives of those poor little fish, who, "_had never injured them, nor ever could_." The sailors were utterly dum-founded at such queer logic as this. Taking their silence for conviction, Ben rose in his argument, and began to play the orator quite outrageously on the main deck. At length an old wag of a boatswain, who had at first been struck somewhat aback by the strangeness of this attack, took courage, and luffing up again, with a fine breeze of humour in his weather-beaten sail, called out to Ben, "_Well, but my young Master preacher, may not we deal by these same cod here, as they deal by their neighbours._"