Читать книгу The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 10 - Бенджамин Франклин - Страница 28

Passy, 24 December, 1782.

Dear Sir:—

I thank you for your ingenious paper in favor of the trees. I own I now wish we had two rows of them in every one of our streets. The comfortable shelter they would afford us, when walking, from our burning summer suns, and the greater coolness of our walls and pavements, would, I conceive in the improved health of the inhabitants, amply compensate the loss of a house now and then by fire, if such should be the consequence. But a tree is soon felled; and, as axes are at hand in every neighborhood, may be down before the engines arrive.

You do well to avoid being concerned in the pieces of personal abuse, so scandalously common in our newspapers that I am afraid to lend any of them here until I have examined and laid aside such as would disgrace us, and subject us among strangers to a reflection like that used by a gentleman in a coffee-house to two quarrellers, who, after a mutually free use of the words, rogue, villain, rascal, scoundrel, etc., seemed as if they would refer their dispute to him: “I know nothing of you, or your affairs,” said he; “I only perceive that you know one another.”

The conductor of a newspaper should, methinks, consider himself as in some degree the guardian of his country’s reputation, and refuse to insert such writings as may hurt it. If people will print their abuses of one another, let them do it in little pamphlets, and distribute them where they think proper. It is absurd to trouble all the world with them; and unjust to subscribers in distant places, to stuff their paper with matters so unprofitable and so disagreeable. With sincere esteem and affection, I am, etc.,

B. Franklin.