to the elements of progress in the colonies has been overlooked. That these efforts were increasing the democratic tendency and awakening the communities to selfconsciousness, may be seen by the rejection of the Albany plan of confederation on the ground that it was not "democratic" enough,—to use the words of Franklin, who was one of the commoners for Pennsylvania. He tells us in his autobiography that it was on his way to the conference that he drew up his plan[1] which after debate was unanimously adopted. "Its fate was singular," writes Franklin, "the assemblies (of the colonies) did not adopt it, as they all thought there was too much prerogative in it, and in England it was judged to have too much of the democratic." But at least the concrete idea of a Union was before the people.
The difficulties with the colonial government, oppressive as they were, were not as important as the difficulties attendant on the finding of adequate protection against the French and the Indians, and the idea of a nation was to come originally out of the latter condition rather than the former. In the Albany conference, Franklin, the printer and editor, was the one man of vision; he, a man of the people, was the leader; he who had come up from nothing, the prototype of the Greeley journaliststatesman, was the one man that made the conference a memorable gathering. Men who had hitherto looked down upon the press, who had regarded papers as "miserable sheets," began to see their usefulness. In the next chapter we see that these men did not disdain to use these sheets for the cause that they held sacred, leading the way for their later use by even the scholarly Jefferson and Hamilton.
- ↑ Franklin's Autobiography, i, 243.
