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

The greatest romance of the new world is the actual life of Benjamin Franklin, for that life was the dream of new world possibilities reduced to reality. A seventeen-year-old apprentice, a runaway from a colony where he was too well known to longer remain, a penniless stranger in another where he started his life anew without acquaintances, friends or influence, an unaided maker of fame and fortune for himself at forty-two years of age, a man of tremendous executive capacity and money-amassing possibilities, he retired at that age on a fair competence and became a contemplative philosopher, thenceforth the giver of his life to the lives of his fellow men - the energizing magnet around which all the altruism of the most free-thought community in America centered. The corner-stone layer of that colonial union on which many claim the nation was subsequently built. A scientist whom the world recognized and revered. The first great teacher through the press of practical life - its habits, its sanity, and its economies. An inventor of things that pertain to the necessities of life, who refused to lay the tribute of monopoly therefor upon his fellows. At fifty-one the solitary representative, in the alien and indifferent atmosphere of England, of colonial rights. A lonely prophet in an old world ignorant of the future of an unknown new world. At seventy, a signer of our Declaration of Independence.

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