Franklin's Apprenticeship and the Spectator

Abstract

HENRY ADAMS asserted that at end of his youth, circumstances favored him with a theatrical scene for education in ways of world. Watching struggles between his father and British cabinet during American Civil War, he saw at firsthand how chimerical was power of great. Month by month, he wrote, the demonstration followed its mathematical stages; one of most perfect educational courses in politics and diplomacy that a young man ever had a chance to pursue. The most costly tutors in world were provided at public expense-Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, Lord Westbury, Lord Selborne, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, and their associates, paid by British Government; William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, William Maxwell Evarts, Thurlow Weed, and other considerable professors employed by American Government; but there was only one student to profit by this large staff of teachers. None profited so well as Adams himself.l Long before, in Boston of 1722, another young man also had advantage of impressive tutors. Like Adams, Benjamin Franklin witnessed a crisis between an outworn, tenacious old order and a new form of power emerging in person of his own brother. One set of tutors consisted of Puritan clergy of Boston; other, of men like Dr. Douglass, a group of would-be wits who wrote for New England Courant, and James Franklin, his brother, who published it. The crisis occurred when smallpox affected thousands in Boston in 1721. After clergy supported a limited experiment in inoculation, Douglass and Courant protested, thus opening a means of expression to long-suppressed resentments against ministers. The quarrel went on for months, outlasting epidemic, but in end no one won. The Courant ceased