Having discovered the emptiness of this business, Franklin at last completed his arrangements for his return home. He placed his agencies in the hands of Arthur Lee. His last day in London he passed with his stanch old friend. Dr. Priestley, and a large part of the time, says the doctor, "he was looking over a number of American newspapers, directing me what to extract from them for the English ones; and in reading them he was frequently not able to proceed for the tears literally running down his cheeks." Such was the depth of feeling in one often accounted callous, indifferent, or even untrustworthy in the matter of American relations with England. He felt some anxiety as to whether his departure might not be prevented by an arrest, and made his journey to Portsmouth with such speed and precautions as were possible.[36] But he was not interrupted, and sailed on some day near the middle of March, 1775. His departure marked an era in the relations of Great Britain with her American colonies. It signified that all hope of agreement, all possibility of reconciliation upon one side or of recession upon the other, were absolutely over. That Franklin gave up in despair the task of preventing a war meant that war was certain and imminent. He arrived in Philadelphia May 5, 1775. During his absence his wife had died, and his daughter had married a young man, Richard Bache, whom he had never yet seen.
[Note 36: Parton's _Life of Franklin_, ii. 70.]
From the solitude of the ocean to the seething turmoil which Franklin found in the colonies must have been a startling transition. He had come home an old man, lacking but little of the allotted threescore years and ten. He had earned and desired repose, but never before had he encountered such exacting, important, and unremitting labor as immediately fell to his lot. Lexington and Concord fights had taken place a fortnight before he landed, and the news preceded him in Philadelphia by a few days only. Many feelings may be discerned in the brief note which he wrote on May 16 to Dr. Priestley:--
"DEAR FRIEND,--You will have heard, before this reaches you, of a march stolen by the regulars into the country by night, and of their _expedition_ back again. They retreated twenty miles in six hours. The governor had called the Assembly to propose Lord North's pacific plan, but before the time of their meeting began the cutting of throats. You know it was said he carried the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other, and it seems he chose to give them a taste of the sword first."