colonies upon one another, the isolated theocracy of New England
naturally relaxed somewhat of its grip on the minds of the laity. When
Franklin was a printer's apprentice in Boston, setting type on his
brother's _New England Courant_, the fourth American newspaper, he got
hold of an odd volume of the _Spectator_, and formed his style upon
Addison, whose manner he afterward imitated in his _Busy-Body_ papers
in the Philadelphia _Weekly Mercury_. He also read Locke and the
English deistical writers, Collins and Shaftesbury, and became himself
a deist and free-thinker; and subsequently when practicing his trade in
London, in 1724-26, he made the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author
of the _Fable of the Bees_, at a pale-ale house in Cheapside, called
"The Horns," where the famous free-thinker presided over a club of wits
and boon companions. Though a native of Boston, Franklin is identified
with Philadelphia, whither he arrived in 1723, a runaway 'prentice boy,
"whose stock of cash consisted of a Dutch dollar and about a shilling
in copper." The description in his _Autobiography_ of his walking up
Market Street munching a loaf of bread, and passing his future wife,
standing on her father's doorstep, has become almost as familiar as the
anecdote about Whittington and his cat.

It was in the practical sphere that Franklin was greatest, as an
originator and executor of projects for the general welfare. The list
of his public services is almost endless. He organized the
Philadelphia fire department and street-cleaning service, and the
colonial postal system which grew into the United States Post Office
Department. He started the Philadelphia public library, the American
Philosophical Society, the University of Pennsylvania, and the first
American magazine, _The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle_; so
that he was almost singly the father of whatever intellectual life the
Pennsylvania colony could boast. In 1754, when commissioners from the