Truly this spirit of Doctor Franklin could be profitably invoked in this
day and generation, when nations are so intolerant of the ideas of other
nations.

As the members, moved by Franklin's humorous and yet moving appeal, came
forward to subscribe their names, Franklin drew the attention of some of
the members to the fact that on the back of the President's chair was
the half disk of a sun, and, with his love of metaphor, he said that
painters had often found it difficult to distinguish in their art a
rising from a setting sun. He then prophetically added:

"I have often and often in the course of the sessions and the
vicissitudes of my hopes and fears in its issues, looked at that
behind the President without being able to tell whether it was
rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know
that it is a rising and not a setting sun."

Time has verified the genial doctor's prediction. The career of the new
nation thus formed has hitherto been a rising and not a setting sun. He
had in his sixty years of conspicuously useful citizenship--and perhaps
no nation ever had a more untiring and unselfish servant--done more than
any American to develop the American Commonwealth, but like Moses, he
was destined to see the promised land only from afar, for the new
Government had hardly been inaugurated, before Franklin died, as full of
years as honours. Prophetic as was his vision, he could never have
anticipated the reality of to-day, for this nation, thus deliberately
formed in the light of reason and without blood or passion, is to-day,
by common consent, one of the greatest and, I trust I may add, one of
the noblest republics of all time.