The Book of Franklin 3 · Written by himself, from his Autobiography and the rules of his club
Benjamin Franklin, born at Boston in 1706, died at Philadelphia in 1790. He ran from his brother at seventeen, took up printing, ran a newspaper, and published Poor Richard. In 1752 he tried lightning with a kite and made the lightning rod from it; he also made bifocal glasses and a new kind of stove, and patented none of them, saying the benefit should be common. He founded a lending library, a fire company, a hospital and a college. He helped draft the Declaration, then went to France as envoy and got the alliance that won the war. The Autobiography is unfinished and was printed after his death. He held slaves as a younger man, gave that up, and as an old one was president of an abolition society, petitioning Congress against slavery months before he died. This is set down not to catch him out: that a man will overturn what he himself did before is the thing this scripture values. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He is the first tradesman in this scripture — a printer; and the one who did the greatest number of unrelated things well: ran a newspaper, tried lightning, founded a lending library and a hospital, drafted the founding papers, went abroad as an envoy. He was a deist and wrote private devotions, and he never closes an argument by appealing to divine will. The club he founded settled matters by evidence. As for virtue, he set down thirteen of them, ruled a table, and each day put a mark under whichever he had broken, hoping for one week with a clean page. He never got the clean page. What he did was uncommon; his manner was not. He joked, and got on as easily at court as among ordinary people.
3.1When I was young I loved to argue, and I generally won.
3.2An old friend took me aside and said: Benjamin, you have won every one of them, and they have all walked away.
3.3He said: the way you speak is meant to make a man give in, not to make him see.
3.4I did not like hearing it. But I knew he was right.
3.5From that time I changed one very small thing — only the way I spoke.
3.6I stopped saying certainly. I stopped saying undoubtedly. I stopped saying it must be so.
3.7I said instead: I conceive; it appears to me; if I am not mistaken; I am inclined to think.
3.8At first it was awkward, like wearing another man’s coat.
3.9After some years it was my own coat.
3.10The good this did me was more than I looked for.
3.11My words carried further, not less far. Men would hear me, and would also contradict me.
3.12And when I was wrong, changing my mind was no longer a disgrace — since I had not nailed the thing down to begin with.
3.13A few of us formed a club that met on Friday evenings. We made rules for it:
3.14No man might flatly contradict another, or show any air of triumph. There was a small fine for it.
3.15We began each meeting with a set of fixed questions. One of them was: what have you lately read or heard that you did not know before?
3.16Understand that this rule is not about politeness.
3.17A man who says certainly has spared his opponent the labour of thinking: you have settled it, and all that is left him is to submit or not.
3.18A man who says I conceive has laid the thing back out between the two of you.
3.19Most of what I brought about in my life I did not win by arguing alone. It was laid out this way, and several of us saw it together.