The people made a law; and as there cannot be rational freedom where there are arbitrary restraints, they adopted Cicero’s maxim, and proclaimed liberty as the law of the land:—
“_Libertas est potestas faciendi id quod jure liceat._”
One of the strongest tests by which the progressive prosperity of a country may be ascertained is that of its postal department. It forms a chain which links together all private and public interests; it links state to state, countries to countries, nations to nations. It is the alphabet of the world!
Benjamin Franklin appointed Richard Bache, his son-in-law, deputy postmaster. They established mail-riders to carry the mails, and stationed them at distances of twenty-five miles, to deliver from one to the other and return to their starting-places: they travelled night and day, and were men selected for their honesty and sobriety.
At the same time it was ordered that three advice-boats should be established, “one to ply between North Carolina and such ports as shall be most convenient to the place where Congress shall be sitting,” one other between the State of Georgia and the same port. The boats to be armed, and to be freighted by individuals for the sake of diminishing the public expense.
The state of the country was such that it became necessary to enlist the services of the most prominent men in its cause, both at home and abroad; and who so popular then as Benjamin Franklin? A writer speaking of him and the period says, “With a fame unequalled in brilliancy by that of any other man of those times, not only as a philosopher and sage, but as a profound political thinker, and an undaunted asserter of the rights and liberties of his country, Franklin’s name was now familiarly known and revered throughout all Europe.”
Is it to be wondered at, therefore, that he should have been appointed one of the commissioners to France? The commissioners first appointed for this purpose, on the 26th of September, 1776, were Franklin, Silas Dean, and Thomas Jefferson. The last, however, declined, and Arthur Lee, of Virginia, was put in his place. Mr. Lee and Mr. Dean were both in Europe, the former having been employed several years in England as a colonial agent, and the latter having been sent out in the preceding March by the committee of secret correspondence, with a view to diplomatic as well as commercial objects; and Franklin, after a boisterous voyage in the United States sloop-of-war _Reprisal_, Captain Wickes, and after escaping from the guns of several British cruisers, met them in Paris in the latter part of December, 1776. This portion of history is familiar to all.