letters, which the reputation of your genius brings to you, proper persons to whom we may apply for this purpose; but without entering into any agreement with them on my part. For I would leave it entirely free to the parents to judge and choose as they shall see proper: All the share I pretend to claim is, that of contributing my care and my money. If, therefore, any one shall be found, who thinks himself qualified for the undertaking, he may repair thither; but without relying upon anything but his merit. Farewell.
These proposals were the consummation of many years' reflection over the wants of the Province, which he had made his home, in the matter of better and larger educational facilities, for the growing generations. The early settlers of Pennsylvania had brought with them the culture of their home training, but as Franklin expresses it, the demands of the urgent present forbade them laying preparations for a like training to their children. His own native city had as its immediate neighbor the town of Cambridge, where Harvard College had already existed for one hundred and twelve years. In its training and its influence he had no share; "his father, burdened with a numerous family, was unable without inconvenience to support the expense of a college education," he records in his autobiography.[1]
I was put to the grammar school at eight years of age; my father intending to devote me, as the tithe of his sons, to the service of the church. My early readiness in learning to read [he continues], (which must have been very early, as I do not remember when I could not read,) and the opinion of all his friends, that I should certainly make a good scholar, encouraged him in this purpose of his. My uncle Benjamin, too, approved of it, and proposed to give me all his short-hand volumes of sermons, I suppose as a stock to set up with, if I would learn his character. I continued, however, at the grammar school not quite one year, though in that time I had risen gradually from the middle of the class of
- ↑ Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin. John Bigelow, 1887. i 38.
