By carefully making and preserving such distinctions, you will (to keep to my simile of the cake) act like a wise gingerbread-baker; who, to facilitate a division, cuts his dough half through in those places, where, when baked, he would have it broken to pieces.
Franklin compares the careful management of an empire to a gingerbread baker cutting dough for easier division.
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More from Benjamin Franklin
The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement.
Our legal method of compulsion is by imprisonment: the Indians cannot and will not imprison one another; and if we attempt to imprison them, I apprehend it would be generally disliked by the nations, and occasion breaches.
It is upon this fact I found the propriety of the measure of settling a barrier colony in those parts of our frontiers, which are not the immediate residence or hunting-grounds of our Indians.
Believing therefore, that it is my duty, I shall honestly speak my mind in the following paper.
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