Benjamin Franklin: “If you would recal your forces and stay at home, we should meditate nothing to injure you.”

If the treaty cannot be made as much to your advantage as to ours, don't make it.

Yet had I gone at 70, it would have cut off 12 of the most active years of my life, employed too in matters of the greatest importance; but whether I have been doing good or mischief, is for time to discover.

As it is in my power, as far as my testimony will be regarded, to refute this charge, I think it due to our friendship to do it.

With these sentiments he left England; but when, on his arrival in America, he found the war begun, and that there was no receding, no man entered more warmly into the interests of what he then considered as his country, in opposition to…