with reference to the fundamental questions that were occupying the attention of Americans and Englishmen at the time of their publication. After the series was complete, they were collected and published by Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, by Benjamin Franklin in Dublin, and at about the same time were published in Paris. Benjamin Franklin, Dickinson's ancient and continued enemy, himself secured their publication in Dublin and Paris. There were also two editions printed in Boston.

These letters were received with enthusiasm throughout the colonies, and the "Pennsylvania Farmer" found himself looked upon as the foremost patriot of America.

About this time the first cargoes of tea arrived in the colonies since the passage of the bill taxing tea in America, and it is interesting to know that the citizens of Philadelphia held a meeting, at which Dr. Thomas Cadwalader presided and Dickinson took a prominent part, to take steps to prevent the landing of tea in Philadelphia, seventeen days before the similar meeting was held in Boston which preceded the famous Boston tea-party. Such drastic measures as were resorted to in Boston were not, however, found necessary in Philadelphia.

Mr. Dickinson suffered from the position he took in the Pennsylvania Assembly upon the question of the Proprietary charter, and at the expiration of his term was not re-elected. After devoting his leisure to study and reflection, the results of which are seen in the "Farmer's Letters," he became again a member of Assembly in 1771. On the 5th of March of this year, at the request of the

Assembly, he drafted a petition to the king, which was unanimously adopted. The petition, which is in the tone of the most loyal devotion to the Crown, asks that the people of Pennsylvania may be restored to the condition they were in before 1763.

In the mean time, in 1770, Dickinson had been married. to Miss Mary Norris, the only daughter of Isaac Norris, for many years Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly, but then deceased, and with his wife resided at Fairhill, the beautiful country home of the Norris family, where was collected one of the finest libraries in America. Dickinson was married on July 19, and the only wedding-tour we can find any record of began some time in September, the itinerary of the journey touching Reading, Bethlehem, Lancaster, York, and the frontier town of Carlisle, being, in fact, a tour of Pennsylvania. Let us stop to quote from a letter written by Dickinson to an aunt during the journey, dated September 20, 1770.

Among other things he says, "We dined at Pottsgrove, and among memorable things it may be put down as one, that after proper respect paid to a beefsteak, somebody desired an egg to be poached. It may also be added as another remarkable fact that yesterday completed two months of marriage without a quarrel. . . . To-morrow we proceed for Carlisle, which I expect to reach on Saturday." This journey, however, had a double purpose. It was not known what position the German and Scotch-Irish inhabitants of Pennsylvania would take upon the question of resistance to the English Parliament, and Dickinson

desired to sound them on this point. It is needless to say that he found them all the stanchest patriots.

As the hour approached when the fate of America was. to be tried, Dickinson, with the wise conservatism of a man bred to the law and learned in the classics, having ever before him the precedents of history, began to shrink from the advanced course taken by the patriots of New England. He refused to endorse the measures of Massachusetts. He did not think America in the best condition for revolution at that time. Consequently in New England he fell from the high estate in the popular estimation that once he held, and, instead of the greatest American patriot, was called “timid” and “apathetic.”

He was chosen a delegate from Pennsylvania to the first Congress in 1774, and was immediately placed upon a committee to draft a petition to the king, which he did personally, as well as a subsequent petition to the king passed at the next Congress. These petitions rank among the other state papers prepared by Dickinson, and he, in fact, was the author of practically all of the many issued by Congress during this period, whose ample eulogium is the tribute paid to them by Lord Chatham when he said in the House of Lords, "History, my Lords, has been my favorite study, and in the celebrated writings of antiquity I have often admired the patriotism of Greece and Rome, but I must declare and vow that in the master states of the world I know not the people nor the Senate who, in such a complication of difficult circumstances, can stand in preference to the Delegates