Sheep and Wolves

Letter 108

Kind Reader,

My father sired 17 children, but after the death of my brother Peter in 1766, there were only two of us left: myself, and my sister Jane. We two have jogged along together for more than twenty years since then. She lives yet, as the widow Mrs. Jane Franklin Mecom, in Boston, where we were both born. Today I give you a letter I wrote to her from London in 1773. I remain her affectionate brother and

your friend and humble servant,

B. Franklin
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London – November 1, 1773.

Dear Sister,

I received your kind letter of June 28th with great pleasure, as it informed me of your welfare.

I thank you for your good wishes that I may be a means of restoring harmony between the two countries [of Britain and America]. It would make me very happy to see it, whoever was the instrument. I had used all the smooth words I could muster, and I grew tired of meekness when I saw it without effect. Of late therefore I have been saucy, and in two papers, Rules for Reducing a Great Empire to a Small One and An Edict of the King of Prussia, I have held up a looking-glass in which some ministers may see their ugly faces, and the nation its injustice. Those papers have been much taken notice of, many are pleased with them, and a few very angry, who I am told will make me feel their resentment, which I must bear as well as I can, and shall bear the better if any public good is done, whatever the consequence to myself. [In the margin: This to yourself.] In my own private concerns with mankind, I have observed that to kick a little when under imposition, has a good effect. A little sturdiness when superiors are much in the wrong, sometimes occasions consideration. And there is truth in the old saying, that “If you make yourself a sheep, the wolves will eat you.”

I communicated Cousin Jenny’s verses to my little circle of female friends who made the Bouts Rimes [see note below], and they were pleased to praise them. I hope she is got well home from her visit to Nantucket. My love to her.

Your neighbor Hall must have been pretty well advanced in years when he died. I remember him a young man when I was a very young boy. In looking back how short the time seems! I suppose that all the passages of our lives that we have forgotten, being so many links taken out of the chain, give the more distant parts leave as it were to come apparently nearer together.

I was glad to hear of the ship’s arrival in which I sent your things. I hope they will prove agreeable and advantageous to you. If you possibly can, try to increase your capital, by adding the profits. Consuming all the profits and some of the principal, will soon reduce it to nothing. I am ever, my dear sister,

your very affectionate brother,

B. Franklin
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“Bouts-Rimés”: A list of words that rhyme to one another, drawn up by another hand, and given to a poet, who is to make a poem to the rhymes in the same order that they were placed upon the list.