Old Ben Franklin and His Miserable Maxims

Benjamin Franklin was one of those persons whom they call philosophers. He early prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages.

His simplest acts were contrived with a view of their being held up for the emulation of boys forever. It was in this spirit that he became the son of a soap­boiler, and probably for no other reason than that the efforts of all future boys who try to be anything might be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap­boilers.

With a malevolence without parallel in history he would work all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smoldering fire so that all boys might have to do that also. Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at mealtime—a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since.

His maxims were full of animosity toward boys. Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over one of those everlasting aphorisms. If he buys two cents’ worth of peanuts, his father says, “Remember what Franklin has said, my son: ‘A groat a day is a penny a year,’” and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts. If he wants to spin his top before his work is done, his father quotes, “Procrastination is the thief of time.” If he does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it because “virtue is its own reward.”

A boy is robbed of his natural rest because Franklin said once: “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy, wealthy and wise on such terms. The legitimate result of this maxim is my present state of general debility, indigence and mental aberration.

My parents used to have me up before nine o’clock in the morning, sometimes, when I was a boy. If they had let me take my natural rest, where would I be now? Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.

And what an adroit old adventurer he was. In order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday, he used to hang a key on the string, and let on to be fishing by lightning, and a guileless public would chirp of the ‘wisdom’ and the ‘genius’ of the hoary Sabbath­-breaker.

He invented a stove that would smoke your head off. He was always proud of how he entered Philadelphia with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls of bread under his arm. Really, anybody could have done this.

Franklin did many notable things for his country, and made her young name honoured in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that. No. The idea is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersions from Babel.

I merely desire to do away with the prevalent calamitous idea among heads of families that Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting until morning, and that this programming, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of every father’s fool. It is time these gentlemen found out that these execrable eccentricities are only the evidence of genius, not the creators of it.

I wish I had been the father of my parents long enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let their son have an easier time of it.

When I was a child, I had to boil soap, notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early and study geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do everything as Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin someday. And here I am.

—By Mark Twain (1872)