Queries

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Questions put by Benjamin Franklin to his Junto, a club for mutual improvement that he founded in Philadelphia in 1727:

  • How shall we judge of the goodness of a writing? Or what qualities should a writing have to be good and perfect in its kind? (His own answer: “It should be smooth, clear, and short.”)
  • Can a man arrive at perfection in this life, as some believe; or is it impossible, as others believe?
  • Wherein consists the happiness of a rational creature?
  • What is wisdom? (“The knowledge of what will be best for us on all occasions, and the best ways of attaining it.”)
  • Is any man wise at all times and in all things? (“No, but some are more frequently wise than others.”)
  • Whether those meats and drinks are not the best that contain nothing in their natural taste, nor have anything added by art, so pleasing as to induce us to eat or drink when we are not thirsty or hungry, or after thirst and hunger are satisfied; water, for instance, for drink, and bread or the like for meat?
  • Is there any difference between knowledge and prudence? If there is any, which of the two is most eligible?
  • Is it justifiable to put private men to death, for the sake of public safety or tranquillity, who have committed no crime? As, in the case of the plague, to stop infection; or as in the case of the Welshmen here executed?
  • If the sovereign power attempts to deprive a subject of his right (or, which is the same thing, of what he thinks his right), is it justifiable in him to resist, if he is able?
  • Which is best: to make a friend of a wise and good man that is poor or of a rich man that is neither wise nor good?
  • Does it not, in a general way, require great study and intense application for a poor man to become rich and powerful, if he would do it without the forfeiture of honesty?
  • Does it not require as much pains, study, and application to become truly wise and strictly virtuous as to become rich?
  • Whence comes the dew that stands on the outside of a tankard that has cold water in it in the summer time?

From Carl Van Doren’s biography. “New members had to stand up with their hands on their breasts and say they loved mankind in general and truth for truth’s sake. … In time the Junto had so many applications for membership it was at a loss to know how to limit itself to the twelve originally planned.”

| History · Society

Points of Pride

She’s the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring
That drives the rod that turns the knob that works the thingumebob,
And it’s the girl that makes the thing that holds that oil that oils the ring
That works the thingumebob THAT’S GOING TO WIN THE WAR!

— Popular song of 1942

“I’ve Danced With a Man, Who’s Danced With a Girl, Who’s Danced With the Prince of Wales”

— Popular song of 1927

Dr. Polycarp was, as you all know, an unusually sallow bimetallist. ‘There,’ people of wide experience would say, ‘There goes the sallowest bimetallist in Cheshire.’

— G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904

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Dead Letters

In 1814, as the British burned Washington, commander Sir George Cockburn targeted the offices of the National Intelligencer newspaper, telling his troops, “Be sure that all the C’s are destroyed, so that the rascals cannot any longer abuse my name.”

British politician Thomas Erskine (1750-1823) had such an enormous ego that, it was said, one newspaper had to curtail its coverage because its “stock of capital I’s was quite exhausted.”

| History · Language

Briefly

Asked whether he could summarize the lessons of history in a short book, Columbia historian Charles Beard said he could do it in four sentences:

  1. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
  2. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small.
  3. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
  4. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
| History · Quotations

First Impressions

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In 1668, Charles II’s court was dominated by five high councillors rather than a single favorite, raising concerns of a threat to the throne’s authority.

It didn’t help that their names literally spelled CABAL: (left to right) the Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, the Earl of Arlington, the Duke of Buckingham, the Lord Ashley, and the Duke of Lauderdale.

In fact the five were fractious and mistrustful, and the group broke up within a few years. But Lord Macaulay called them “the first germ of the present system of government by a Cabinet.”

| History

Details

As the U.S. tariff act of June 6, 1872, was being drafted, planners intended to exempt “Fruit plants, tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

Unfortunately, as the language was being copied, a comma was inadvertently moved one word to the left, producing the phrase “Fruit, plants tropical and semi-tropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation.”

Importers pounced, claiming that the new phrase exempted all tropical and semi-tropical fruit, not just the plants on which it grew.

The Treasury eventually had to agree that this was indeed what the language now said, opening a loophole for fruit importers that deprived the U.S. government of an estimated $1 million in revenue. Subsequent tariffs restored the comma to its intended position.

| History · Language · Oddities

First Things

George Washington’s teenage journal contains this love acrostic:

From your bright sparkling Eyes, I was undone;
Rays, you have, more transparent than the sun,
Amidst its glory in the rising Day,
None can you equal in your bright arrays;
Constant in your calm and unspotted Mind;
Equal to all, but will to none Prove kind,
So knowing, seldom one so Young, you’l Find.
Ah! woe’s me, that I should Love and conceal,
Long have I wish’d, but never dare reveal,
Even though severely Loves Pains I feel;
Xerxes that great, was’t free from Cupids Dart,
And all the greatest Heroes, felt the smart.

Reading the first letter of each line spells FRANCES ALEXA. Who was this? Possibly the subject’s full name was Frances Alexander and Washington hadn’t finished the poem.

| History · Language · Poems

Summing Up

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Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than for ostentation.

— Edward Gibbon, on the Roman emperor Gordian II

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