From Leibniz to Franklin on ‘Happiness’

When Franklin and Raspe first met back in 1766, Franklin had been involved in discussions with Matthew Boulton over the development of his steam engine. The year before, Franklin had brought Dr. William Small to Boulton, and Small worked as the industrial manager of Boulton's manufacturing plant.⁶¹ Then, on Feb. 22, 1766, the same day the Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, Boulton wrote to Franklin about the steam engine that he and Small had crafted:

The addition you have made to my happiness in being the cause of my acquaintance with the amiable and ingenious Dr. Small deserves more than thanks.... Query,—which of the steam valves do you like best? Is it better to introduce the jet of cold water at the bottom of the receiver ... or at the top? Each has its advantages and disadvantages. My thoughts about the secondary or mechanical contrivances of the engine are too numerous to trouble you with in this letter, and yet I have not been lucky enough to hit upon any that are objectionless ... [I]f any thought occurs to your fertile genius which you think may be useful, or preserve me from error in the execution of this engine, you'll be so kind as to communicate it to me.⁶²

Raspe worked directly with Boulton for the last dozen years of his life, beginning no later than November 1782. However, it is hard to believe, given their common associates around Franklin and his Lunar Society friends, that they had not been in collaboration earlier than this. One day in 1779, for example, when Raspe was examining mummies in the Egyptian section of the British Museum, Boulton was next door in the Greek section, sketching ancient Greek vases and medallions! Regardless, by November 1782, Raspe had contacted Boulton regarding his mines. Not only was Raspe an expert in geology and minerals, but he had grown up around the Harz Mountain mines (whose overseer in the early 1680's, Gottfried Leibniz, had worked on the problem of developing machinery to pump standing water out of them). Raspe's father, Christian Theophilus Raspe, had lived in these Harz Mountains and worked in the Hanoverian state department of mines and forests.

Raspe's joining the Boulton mining operations was not a given. Boulton's operation was of national strategic importance, and everything that he did was examined for its security implications. He certainly knew about the troubles that Raspe had had with the Landgrave of Hesse. Boulton had to satisfy himself about the situation sufficiently, so as to not leave himself open to attacks upon his operation by the anti-industrial faction in England. Boulton then employed Raspe as the scientific consultant for the Cornish mining industry, and soon, the head of the Assay Office for the area. One of Raspe's many proposals, was to use the unusually hard tungsten that he located, for the hardening of steel, such that anchors could be cast in one operation.

Raspe maintained his continental connections. In October 1783, his report on the use of the steam engines in the Cornish metal industry was published in the Berlin magazine of James Bernoulli, a member of Raspe's extended political family.⁶³ In 1784, he prepared a paper, "Fire, Smoke, and Acids," for the Imperial Academy at St. Petersburg. Simultaneously, he worked in London on a project for replicating statuary for the museum of the Czarina, Catherine the Great. By 1785, he certainly had enough contact within Russia, and knowledge of the impending foolishness of Russia in pursuing a war against Turkey, that would motivate his composing The Adventures of Baron von Münchausen that summer.

In his last dozen years, Raspe seems to have been a litmus test in various regions of England, as to whether the feudalists or the pro-development forces in the area had the upper hand. For example, commissioned to perform a mineralogical survey of the Scottish Highlands, and to do for them what he had accomplished for Cornwall, Raspe worked long and hard hours, in difficult weather conditions.⁶⁴ Political fights would occur over whether the area was to be developed, or looted. In the midst of this, we have here one final example of the unabated, irrational hatred of Raspe by the British oligarchy, as follows.

In the Scottish Highlands, Raspe was hosted by Sir John Sinclair, who used and relied upon Raspe's report on the mining prospects. Sinclair never claimed any problem with it or him, and, in fact, voted up a resolution of thanks for Raspe at the Highland Society. Sinclair then wrote up the findings in a Statistical Account that he published, as the first President of the Agricultural Society. However, years later, after Sinclair was dead, his daughter would relate a story, that Raspe ran a scam upon her poor father. Later, the Romantic, pro-feudal novelist Sir Walter Scott would take the matter one step further, weaving the daughter's gossip into a villainous character in his novel The Antiquary. There, Raspe appears as the character Hermann Dousterswivel, a wandering German mining prospector in the Scottish Highlands, who defrauds his host. The underlying rage against Raspe for his singular role in freeing Leibniz's manuscript from its prison, would express itself in just such uncontrollable excretions.

In the summer and fall of 1791, when the possibilities of a republican victory in France by Lafayette and his collaborator Bailly,⁶⁵ were being overwhelmed by mob mentality, Raspe would offer the following appraisals. Writing to Boulton, in recommendation of the Swedish painter Carl von Breda, Raspe has fun: "He does not speculate upon Fire Engines, Mills, Machinery, Buckle or Button-making, nor upon the New Jerusalem, the abolition of the Slave Trade, French Republicanism or Cotton Mills, in which some of his discontented and expatriated countrymen have lately distinguished themselves, if not successfully, yet notoriously ... ." And, more explicitly, Raspe wrote that France had become a place

where the Reformers and Constitution-Menders go forward as Ropemakers—the wrong way—where by robbing and plundering, they have undone publick Credit instead of creating it, and where Shilling and Sixpenny Assignats and unfounded Paper, unsupported by national honesty and Credit will, I apprehend, for many years to come, keep them from coining anything like Silver or Gold, and from stamping their puffed patriotism on anything but Waste paper and base Bell-metal.⁶⁶

His old collaborator Benjamin Franklin made similar anti-Jacobin comments, even earlier into the French troubles. Shortly after the violence of the summer and fall of 1789, beginning with the storming of the Bastille, he wrote with serious jest to the French scientist, J.B. LeRoy:

Are you still living? Or have the mob of Paris mistaken the head of a monopolizer of knowledge, for a monopolizer of corn, and paraded it about the streets upon a pole. Great part of the news we have had from Paris, for near a year past, has been very afflicting. ... The voice of Philosophy I apprehend can hardly be heard among those tumults. ... Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency.⁶⁷

Raspe died in 1794, age 56, while on a trip to develop the copper mines of western Ireland, where he fell prey, in an impoverished, disease-ridden area, to what was probably an epidemic of spotted fever. Earlier, in 1785, his lifelong concern for public education, pedagogical museums, and the like, combined with his talent with materials and chemicals, had drawn him to the London studio of James Tassie. There, Tassie had developed a vitreous compound that was ideal for making multiple reproductions of statuary and such artwork, so that some balance of quality control and mass production could be attained. Raspe organized a catalogue for Tassie's collection of art reproductions, which involved organizing the various items in some topical fashion, and writing short descriptions of each artwork. In the dedication to the man who sponsored the catalogue, Raspe expressed his conception of the project:

I sincerely congratulate you on this disposition of your mind and heart, for in public as well as in private life, it will always attend you as a friendly genius; and like the Daemon of Socrates, which the profane could not form an idea of, suggest to you both the agreeable knowledge and the more important enjoyment and practice of whatever is true, right, just, and beautiful.

Franklin had attempted for years in Britain to appeal to enlightened self-interest, arguing that more developed colonies could only benefit Britain in the long run. That worked to some extent in the 1766 defeat of the Stamp Act. However, Franklin seems to have expanded his conception of the matter, or at least what he was willing to argue for publicly, by developing in more breadth and depth, the idea of happiness. Thus, in his "Introduction to a Plan for Benefitting the New Zealanders," there is an open appeal to the better angel of the English nature, even as late as 1771:

Britain is now the first Maritime Power in the world, Her Ships are innumberable, capable by their Form, Size, and Strength, of sailing all Seas. ... The Inhabitants of those Countries, our Fellow-Men, have Canoes only; not knowing Iron, they cannot build Ships: They ... cannot therefore come to us. ... From these circumstances, does not some duty seem to arise from us to them? Does not Providence, by these distinguishing Favours, seem to call on us, to do something ourselves for the common Interests of Humanity?

Those who think it their Duty to ask Bread and other Blessings daily from Heaven, should they not think it equally a duty to communicate of those blessings when they have received them; and show their Gratitude to their Great Benefactor, by the only means in their power, promoting the happiness of his other Children? ... [How greatly] may Englishmen deserve such Honour, by communicating the knowledge and use, not of Corn only, but of all the other enjoyments Earth can produce, and which they are now in possession of. Communiter bona profundere, Deum est. [To shower good things over all, is Divine.]

Many Voyages have been undertaken with views of profit or of plunder, or to gratify resentment; to procure some advantage to ourselves, or do some mischief to others: but a voyage is now proposed, to visit a distant people on the other side of the Globe; not to cheat them, not to rob them, not to seize their lands, or enslave their persons; but merely to do them good, and enable them as far as in our power lies, to live as comfortably as ourselves.

It seems a laudable wish, that all the Nations of the Earth were connected by a knowledge of each other, and a mutual exchange of benefits: But a Commercial Nation particularly should wish for a general Civilization of Mankind, since Trade is always carried on to much greater extent with People who have the Arts and Conveniences of Life, than it can be with naked Savages. We may therefore hope, in this undertaking, to be of some service to our Country, as well as to those poor people, who, however distant from us, are in truth related to us, and whose Interests do, in some degree, concern every one who can say, "Homo sum," &c.⁶⁸

Perhaps, Franklin's most explicit view on this came late in 1783. It is in some respects, but not all, remarkably akin to the development of this idea by his co-thinker, Moses Mendelssohn, published a few months earlier, in his work, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism. There, Mendelssohn reflects his discussion with the pro-American faction in the Prussian court in Berlin, including the Royal Councillor von Dohm, and the Assistant Councillor, Ernst Klein. Mendelssohn argued that it was the individual who had the sole right to what he produces or improves, and that such is his private property. However, this sole right was simply one side of his duty, which requires that he not cease his productive identity, but rather continue his productive activity, as a human, with what he has so far produced—hence, to use his product to do the public good. He must figure out how to deploy what he has produced. Someone else cannot preempt one's sovereign duty to do the public good—not because it is one's right to have comfortable space, or some such nonsense, but because one actually does have to accomplish the public good. That was the only reason that one got involved in the business of producing and improving, where the matter of private property arose. As Mendelssohn wrote,

Man cannot be happy without beneficence, whether it be passive, through receiving it, or active, through extending it. He cannot attain perfection except through mutual assistance, through reciprocity of service, through active and passive connection with his fellowman.⁶⁹

In December 1783, Franklin was in Paris, where he wrote to Robert Morris, the indefatigable fundraiser for the Revolution, who had repeatedly shown his willingness to sacrifice. Franklin maintains,

All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.⁷⁰

In the American colonies, the debate ensued in earnest, once the British Stamp Act made the direction of British imperial policy clear to one and all. In Williamsburg, Virginia, Richard Bland's 1766 "An Inquiry into the Rights of the British Colonies" equally refers to Vattel's Law of Nations and Locke's On Civil Government, to frame his arguments. More developed, and more delineated, is James Wilson's pamphlet, "Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament," written in 1770, though not published until 1774. There, he argues:

[A]ll lawful government is founded in the consent of those who are subject to it: such consent was given with a view to ensure and to increase the happiness of the governed, above what they would enjoy in an independent and unconnected state of nature. The consequence is, that the happiness of the society is the first law of every government. [Footnote: The right of sovereignty is that of commanding finally —but in order to procure real felicity; for if this end is not obtained, sovereignty ceases to be a legitimate authority. 2. Burl. 32, 33.] This rule is founded on the law of nature: it must control every political maxim: it must regulate the legislature itself.⁷¹

In 1773, the British Parliament answered this question by handing to the East India Company a monopoly upon the American tea trade. When the Sons of Liberty used the East India Company's tea to turn the Boston harbor into a teapot, Parliament destroyed the republican Massachusetts Charter, by passage of the Coercive Acts. Wilson's pamphlet was printed in time for the assembling of Congress in Philadelphia, September 1774. The delegates read Thomas Jefferson's "A Summary of the Rights of British America," a work that reminds the King that the colonists were "establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as to them shall seem most likely to promote public happiness."

Also in 1774, in Europe, Franklin's associate, Charles Dumas, has a reprint made of Emmerich von Vattel's 1758 The Law of Nations, to further this 1774 debate and education process.⁷³ In the planning period between the 1773 Boston Tea Party and the September 1774 Congress, there would have been time to arrange for the publication and distribution of Vattel's work, and this is the likely explanation of Dumas' action.

The developments in that autumn of 1774 in Philadelphia prepared the "shot heard round the world" the following spring. Franklin's arrival in Philadelphia must have put to rout some of the remaining axioms of Locke amongst the deliberations. Then, late in 1775, Arthur Lee (along with Dumas, the first pair of European agents hired by Congress) was delegated to meet and plan with Beaumarchais. Lee's offer of long-term treaties of commerce with France, was included in Beaumarchais' memorial to the French King, Louis XVI. Shortly thereafter, on March 12, 1776, the memorial of Louis XVI's minister, Vergennes, created Beaumarchais' private firm to arm and equip the Americans. The British blocked the American ports, in defense of the dominance of the East India Company, and on April 6, 1776, Congress opened the ports for trade to the world. George Wythe insisted, "We must declare ourselves a free people," in order to conclude treaties with foreign powers. No more squirming for rights within the British Empire.

When, in June 1776, Franklin's drafting committee began their work on the Declaration of Independence, ten years of informed discussion of Leibniz's principle of "Happiness" as a superior organizing principle for government, had prepared minds. The prose of the Declaration is largely Jefferson's; but the content, in particular the "pursuit of happiness" clause, was the sense of the Congress's deliberations for at least the previous two years.

Secondary indications of this, from Jefferson's rather defensive interchanges many years later (after Franklin had departed the scene), include:

• Jefferson would refer to Franklin's description of his (Jefferson's) role as like, "the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body."
  
  
• When John Adams, as an old man, made the crusty comment: "There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before [referring to 1774—DS]," Jefferson responded, that such statements, as that of Adams, "may all be true. [However, ... ] I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before."
  
  
• In his last year, Jefferson wrote to his critic, Richard Lee, somewhat disingenuously, that the essential thing was "not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent. ... All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day ... ."

Even before Silas Deane, American representative in Paris, could get a copy of the Declaration, copies were circulating in London, Edinburg, Dublin, Leyden, Copenhagen, Warsaw, and Florence—and in Basel, Switzerland, Isaak Iselin had made a German translation. Later, Mirabeau's 1782 Des lettres de cachet et des prisons d'etat, noted: "The sublime manifesto of the United States of America was very generally applauded." The Marquis de Condorcet, Franklin's collaborator in Paris, went even further: It is not enough that such rights "should be written in the books of philosophers and in the hearts of virtuous men; it is necessary that ignorant or weak men should read them in the example of a great people. America has given us this example. The act which declares its independence is a simple and sublime exposition of those rights so sacred and so long forgotten."⁷⁴

The exposition of those inalienable rights centered around the "simple and sublime" triune idea: "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That idea would be fought for, and died for; and that idea would develop, in the debates over the Constitution, the organizing principle of the government, the positive obligation of the "General Welfare" of the population. The articulated proof of Leibniz's conception of man's mind, over Locke's conception of man's mind as a "blank slate," is properly seen in the subsequent success of the "America" hypothesis, that human nature was eminently worth investing in, developing, and transforming.

So, then, consider how low one must stoop to argue, as one contemporary historian does, that, "Even Jefferson's use of 'the pursuit of happiness' as the third term in the triumvirate of basic rights, instead of Locke's term 'estate,' was not ... necessarily a departure in meaning. Stylistically, 'pursuit of happiness' is unquestionably better, and it may have been no more than an instinct for a graceful phrase that caused the substitution." The author gives sophistry a bad name. For the moment, let us leave this sophist anonymous, but ask: Would anyone allow such a sophist to train the policy-makers of this republic?

There is a bit of history before we get to our anonymous sophist. First, as part of the British invasion, Ambrose Serle, the secretary of Lord Howe, launched an attack on the Declaration on July 13, 1776: "A more impudent, false and atrocious Proclamation was never fabricated by the Hands of Man." Then, in London, Lord North commissioned one John Lind, to compose a pamphlet, "An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress." Lind reiterated the line that Locke, Newton, and George III had all taken toward Leibniz and his ideas, writing: "Of the preamble, I have taken little or no notice. The truth is, little or none does it deserve." For Lind, the possibility that the Creator was good, and that it were a happy or felicitous Creator who would endow man with the type of liberty that was necessary for solving the ever-new physical problems of survival—this was not worth any sustained attention, and was certainly outside the bounds of governance.

Lind argues that the innate evil of man's nature—a view common to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke—meant that someone must be unhappy, that governments must sacrifice lives or liberties, or both. No government could possibly exist, except for some arrangement among tribes of "original sinners." The Americans, Lind asserted, in their Declaration based upon "inalienable rights," have "put the axe to the root of all government," since in all past or even possible governments, "some one or other of these rights pretended to be unalienable, is actually alienated." Lind's associate, Jeremy Bentham, offered his "Short Review of the Declaration" (evidently finding pleasure in parrotting Lind's argument): "[T]o secure these rights, they [the signers of the Declaration] are content that Governments should be instituted. They perceive not, or will not seem to perceive, that nothing which can be called government ever was, or ever could be, in any instance, exercised, but at the expence of one or other of those rights."⁷⁵

Lord North, Lind, and Bentham certainly were aware that an argument had been put on the table, which the imperial faction in Britain had gone to great lengths to suppress. They were then in the sixtieth year of the personal suppression of Leibniz's writings by the kings of England.

It is not so clear about the awareness of Richard Henry Lee, who charged that Jefferson had copied the "Declaration of Independence" from Locke's Treatise on Government. One of the Virginia Lee's, he received his law education in England. While he was active in support of the revolution, he later aggressively opposed the Constitution. (And Richard may not have been as big a headache for the Founding Fathers as were his relatives, the traitor, Charles Lee, who gave Howe secret plans to defeat the Americans, and Arthur Lee, who did his best to sabotage Franklin's delegation in Paris, and then sow confusion in the Congress back home.) But it is to Richard Lee that the honor goes of publicly identifying Locke as the source of the Declaration.

The Nineteenth-century South Carolina secessionist politician J.H. Hammond, brought his peculiar form of reasoning and insight, into the thinking of the Founding Fathers:

Our forefathers, when they proclaimed this truth to be self-evident, were not in the best mood to become philosophers, however well calculated to approve themselves the best of patriots. They were much excited, nay, rather angry. ... The phrase was simply a finely sounding one, significant of that sentimental French philosophy, then so current, which was destined to bear such sanguinary consequences.⁷⁶

Abraham Lincoln and friends organized a new political party to address this drift from the mission of the Declaration of Independence, and the consequent Constitution. Rufus Choate, former Senator and elder figure among the Whigs, articulated the position of those who objected to Lincoln taking the Declaration seriously, as if ideas has causal results in the world. Lincoln's former fellow Whigs, including Choate, had bowed to the oligarchy for so long, that they had forgotten which country they lived in. Choate argued that the Declaration was a useless abstraction:

Is it man as he ought to be or man as he is, that we must live with? ... Do you assume that all men ... uniformly obey reason? ... Where on earth is such a fool's paradise as that to be found? ... [Such foolishness is the Republican party's] mission to inaugurate freedom and put down oligarchy, its constitution the glittering and sounding generalities of the Declaration of Independence.⁷⁷

[A]t the birthplace of freedom—in the shadow of Bunker Hill and of the "cradle of liberty," at the home of the Adamses and Warren and Otis—Choate, from our side of the house [Whig—DS], dares to fritter away the birthday promise of liberty, by proclaiming the Declaration to be "a string of glittering generalities"; and the Southern Whigs, working hand in hand with proslavery Democrats, are making Choate's theories practical.⁷⁹

So, how does a modern sophist deal with this messy problem of the Declaration's "pursuit of happiness"? Perhaps the Founding Fathers meant "property," but confused us, because they liked to prettify their language? Thus, we have, again:

Even Jefferson's use of "the pursuit of happiness" as the third term in the triumvirate of basic rights, instead of Locke's term "estate," was not ... necessarily a departure in meaning. Stylistically, "pursuit of happiness" is unquestionably better, and it may have been no more than an instinct for a graceful phrase that caused the substitution.⁸¹

When Raspe and Münchausen brought Franklin into the Hanover library, where they had worked to liberate Leibniz's works, there was one particular Leibniz piece, a 1676 dialogue, which was quoted earlier in this article. There, the character "Theophilus" was much like Franklin, discussing the common good and the Republic, with the character similar to Raspe, "Pacidius":

[H]e was consumed with the study of the common good [communis boni], on whose increase he had often pinned his hope, and on which he had stinted neither wealth nor labor. I had a close friendship with him, and enjoyed his company. At that time, by chance, we were having a long conversation about the State [Republica] ... 

... and the unreliable records of histories, which corrupt the simplicity of deeds with fictitious accounts of their causes, as he was brilliantly showing to have happened in business transactions he had been involved in. ... What you say, Theophilus, about civil history being corrupted by people who think up hidden causes for conspicuous events, is something that becomes even more dangerous in natural history ...

Next, Leibniz has Theophilus applying this developed capacity from analysis of business affairs, to the histories of states, distinguishing such extant histories, from "the simplicity of deeds" that could possibly account for the actual state's existence. This capacity, so identified, was crucial for their discussion into the ways of increasing the common good. Leibniz's felicitous compositional choice extends this same quality of Theophilus, in business and in strategic analysis, now to science. It is to be brought to bear in attacking the ideological flaws in the (Cartesian, mechanist) physics of a mutual friend they have. In physics, also, what must be going on, is a different question from the many, many rationalizations which people offer, that are products of the axiomatic assumptions that they chose not to examine.

What is the "simplicity of deeds" with regard to the declared mission of the United States? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and the pursuit of happiness is just the pursuit of happiness—and the interesting therapeutic problem is to isolate and discover the systemic, ideological obsessions that can't be happy with that.

As Theophilus, Leibniz, and Franklin, so Lyndon LaRouche has shown a certain talent for "analysis situs" methods in areas of business, statecraft, physics, and epistemology.⁸³ He has developed, in terms of potential relative-population density, a measure for dealing with questions about the "simplicity of deeds" of nations, including about the founding of the United States (or about the Italian Renaissance, the collapse of Rome, etc.).

A method of analysis that starts out looking for what explains the generation of the situation, and so assumes that there was a lawful generation, is one that is already confident that the composition of the universe by the Creator was a happy one. The Creator did not simply throw us into existence, without clues as to our mission, and just leave us to use our subjective processes to entertain ourselves for the duration of that existence. Hence, the subjective freedom of thought must necessarily be developed, in order that the physical existence of free human beings may be made possible. The love, or agape, required for the sustained application of one's thought processes, can be enhanced by recreating for oneself what Leibniz would call "the simplicity of deeds" of Socrates, of Jesus, or of Joan of Arc—and we would add, of Gottfried Leibniz and Benjamin Franklin.

Bend your talents toward such historic tasks, and you will know happiness.

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48. Papers, op. cit., Vol. 13, p. 406.

49. It seems likely that Franklin attempted to provide Raspe with alternatives at this point. The English admirers of Raspe secured his membership in the Royal Society in 1769, and, in 1770, there was discussion with Franklin about Raspe leaving Cassel.

50. A simultaneous incident with Beaumarchais may help unlock what was going on here. Beaumarchais suddenly departed from his mission to London, and showed up in Vienna, where he was placed under house arrest. This arrangement allowed him to meet comfortably—daily for seveal weeks—with his counterpart in the Austrian Court, Joseph von Sonnenfels. Was this coordinated with the Raspe-Frederick meeting?

51. Given that the Landgrave would soon lead the world in the renting of subjects as mercenaries, it were likely that his finances were in much shadier shape than anything that he charged Raspe with! A couple of years earlier, the indebtedness of an ally of the Landgrave, the Duke Karl-Eugen of Stuttgart, sent him off to Venice to attempt to gamble his way out of the hands of his usurer, Voltaire. The incident was later famously developed by one of the Duke's political prisoners, Friedrich Schiller, in his novella, The Ghost-seer.

52. Dr. William Small, Franklin's collaborator since 1763, whose partnership with Matthew Boulton had just succeeded in manufacturing working steam engines, died suddenly and unexpectedly on Feb. 25, 1775. As Anton Chaitkin points out, it is a highly suspicious death that has drawn no investigation. See Chaitkin's report on the Lunar Society grouping, "The Franklin School Starts Modern England," The New Federalist, May 1, 199, available at http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/chaitken.htm

53. Carswell, op. cit., p. 104.

54. See Trout, "Life, Liberty," op. cit.

55. It might also have contributed to Schiller's impulse, a few years later, to choose this same theme for his play, The Robbers.

56. Born had, among other things, extracted silver from ores by amalgamation, and, in general, had improved mining by chemical procedures applied to ores. He was the closest thing to a "Benjamin Franklin" in Austria, and tried to create a Franklin-type of non-mystical lodge, centered around scientific developments. He became the model for Sarastro in Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. See David Shavin, "Mozart and the American Revolutionary Upsurge, Fidelio, Winter 1992, (Vol. 1, No. 4)."

57. According to Carswell, it is most likely that the Berlin book publisher August Mylius had sent Lessing's play to Raspe. August might have obtained some satisfaction, as it was his relative, Christlob, who had died in London 27 years earlier. Carswell, op. cit., p. 139.

58. Muriel Mirak Weissbach, "How Champollion Deciphered the Rosetta Stone," Fidelio, Fall 1999 (Vol. VIII, No. 3).

59. See Shavin, "Mozart and the American Revolutionary Upsurge," op. cit.

60. The German edition of 1788 was put out by an old associate of Raspe, Georg Lichtenberg, who had also studied under Kästner, and had been at the 1766 Franklin celebration in Göttingen. Lichtenberg also set up the first Franklin lightning rod in Göttingen, and was a collaborator of Moses Mendelssohn and a teacher of the Humboldts.

61. Small had been an important influence on the young Thomas Jefferson. He was a mathematics and science professor at William and Mary, where he played in a string quartet with the student Thomas Jefferson. The other two members of the quartet were George Wythe, an activist in the debates over the happiness of nations, and Francis Fauquier, the Governor. See Chaitkin, op. cit.

62. Papers, op. cit., Vol. 13, pp. 166-168.

63. This Bernoulli was a sort of political cousin. Raspe's old Cassel collaborator, Mauvillon, worked with C.W. von Dohm in pro-American operations during the Revolution. In 1781, Dohm, with his collaborator Moses Mendelssohn, chose Bernoulli to translate into French their work on the ecumenical basis for citizenship, "On the Civil Improvement of the Jews." Now, in 1783, Raspe was publishing in Bernoulli's journal. Of course, if "cousins," then it was all in the Leibniz family.

64. Coincidentally, Raspe stayed in the same room in Inverary as the republican poet Robert Burns, who, two years earlier, had recorded the Highlands "pre-development" conditions, on the window-pane: "There's naething here but Highland pride/ And Highland scab and hunger;/ If Providence has sent me here,/ 'Twas surely in an anger."

65. The same fellow who, in the cultural offensive of 1765-1767, had won the Berlin Academy prize in 1767, for his Eulogy on Leibniz. See footnote 27.

66. Carswell, ibid., pp. 244-245.

67. Franklin on Franklin, ed. by Paul M. Zall (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), p. 285.

68. Aug. 29, 1771, in Writings, op. cit., pp. 671-673. The plan came six weeks after Captain Cook had returned to England from his first trip to New Zealand. Joseph Banks, the scientist on that voyage, was Franklin's frequent dinner partner, and had undoubtedly briefed him on the expedition. On Cook's upcoming 1772-75 expedition, the subject of Franklin's proposal, was the young Georg Forster, who was clearly inspired by Franklin's mission. In later years, Forster would popularize in verse the image of Franklin's electrical sparks as a Promethean image of freedom—the image developed first by Schiller's "Götterfunken" in his "Ode to Joy," and then by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony.

69. Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, quoted in Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn, a Biographical Study (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), p. 524.

70. Franklin to Robert Morris, Dec. 25, 1783. Writings, op. cit., pp. 1081-1082.

71. Quoted in Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), pp. 108-109.

72. Ibid.

73. Charles W.F. Dumas contacted Franklin in the spring of 1768. A republican activist, he would be established as a European agent of Congress's Committee of Secret Correspondence within days of its establishment, Nov. 29, 1775.

74. Quoted in Becker, op. cit., pp. 230-231.

75. Ibid., pp. 228-229. Since Lind seems to have composed his work in tandem with Bentham, in might be that Bentham wasn't finding pleasure in parrotting Lind, but in parrotting himself. Either way, we can be sure that Bentham was pleasuring himself.

76. Ibid., p. 245.

77. Choate letter to E.W. Farley, Aug. 9, 1856, quoted in Becker, ibid., p. 244.

78. Illinois, of course, was the precise area that was slated never to be developed, per British imperial policy of 90 years earlier.

79. Lincoln to first Republican state convention of Illinois, May 29, 1856, quoted in The Essential Abraham Lincoln, ed. by J.G. Hunt (Avenel, N.J.: Portland House, 1993), p. 99.

80. See Edward Spannaus, "The Facist Legal Theories of the Conservative Revolution," The New Federalist, Sept. 25, 1997 (Vol. IX, No. 37).

81. Carl J. Friedrich, Eaton Professor of Science of Government, Harvard University, and Robert G. McGloskey, Professor of Government, Harvard University, From the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), p. xxxix.

82. See Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th (Washington, D.C.). Friedrich is the one who, in 1957, led the opposition to Huntington and his too bold argument for naked military power. Friedrich's 1962 rapproachement with Huntington at Columbia University, recruited him back to Harvard. Perhaps Friedrich's "instinct for a graceful phrase" helped him pave over their differences in style.

83. One early rule of thumb from LaRouche's days as a management consultant, if memory serves correctly, goes something like this: If something is wrong with the firm, but things appear okay on the surface, see if the bookkeeper is sleeping with the boss.

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