HKB
single Legislative Body, may it not frequently stifle bad Motions in their Infancy, and so prevent their being adopted?" In addition the bicameral house is cumbersome and provocative of delay.
Little is known of Franklin's attitude toward the violent controversy attendant upon efforts toward ratification. In his Ancient Jews and Anti-Federalists[i-363] he warned the traducers of the new Constitution against voiding an instrument which in his opinion was as sound as the frailty of human reason would allow it to be. In fact, said he, it "astonishes me, ... to find this system approaching so near to perfection as it does."[i-364] He may be said to have been anti-federalistic to the extent that he feared a strong executive, guarded jealously the legislative sphere, worried little about checks and balances, sought to accelerate popular sovereignty; he was federalistic to the extent that he opposed state localism with national sovereignty, was not blind to the depravity of human nature and hence felt the need for a vigorous coercive government. To M. Le Veillard he confessed an almost Hamiltonian distrust of the multitude: The Constitution "has ... met with great opposition in some States, for we are at present a nation of politicians. And, though there is a general dread of giving too much power to our governors, I think we are more in danger from too little obedience in the governed."[i-365] He made the same complaint a year later: "We have been guarding against an evil that old States are most liable to, excess of power in the rulers, but our present danger seems to be defect of obedience in the subjects."[i-366] It is difficult to reconcile his inveterate distrust of men with his activity in behalf of an almost universal franchise, reluctance to sanction the principle of checks and balances, and belief in a unicameral legislature; it is difficult to reconcile the Plutarchan fervor with which he advocated the wisdom of following great leaders with his fear of a vigorous executive. It is not improbable that those ideas which are generally anti-federalistic in Franklin's political view are in part the result of his hatred of proprietary abuses which he witnessed as a provincial statesman during his middle age.
VII. FRANKLIN AS SCIENTIST AND DEIST
Jan Ingenhousz, the celebrated physician to Maria Theresa of Austria, wrote a letter to Franklin on May 3, 1780, which doubtless caused the patriarch of Passy to reflect--not without sadness of heart--on the diversified fortune which time and circumstance had devised for him. The physician (no friend to the American revolution) implored Franklin not to abandon "entirely the world Nature whose laws made by the supreme wisdom and is constant and unalterable as its legislature himself [sic]." Ingenhousz lamented that Franklin, "a Philosopher so often and so successfully employed in researches of the most intricate and the most mysterious operations of Nature,"[i-367] should have given his time to politics.
Franklin is now most commonly viewed as a utilitarian moralist, a successful tradesman and printer, a shrewd propagandist and financier, the diplomat of the Revolution, and if at all as a scientist, then only as a virtuoso, fashioning devices, such as open stoves, bifocal spectacles, and lightning rods, for practical uses. Probably few general readers are aware that Franklin was a disinterested scientist in the sense that he interrogated nature with an eye to discovering its immutable laws. It is conversely supposed that Franklin himself was unaware of any inclination to pursue natural science to the exclusion of those political achievements which have identified him as one of the wiliest and sagest diplomats of the Enlightenment.