An article published today in The Epistemology of the Footnote (vol. XXVI, pp. 231, 297 et seq.) reports a new find over which scholars are squabbling with that combination of icy courtesy and exquisite spite that marks committed academics. The casus belli is access to the letters recently uncovered during the refurbishment of the Unitarian Chapel. The Reverend Richard Price was a radical who enjoyed nothing so much as conversation with the free spirits of the age. He befriended Benjamin Franklin during Franklin's second visit to London to buy printing equipment (1757-62) and he also maintained a robust correspondence with the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth century, David Hume, despite - or possibly because of - the latter's atheism.
However, until this latest discovery it was not known that Franklin and Hume wrote to each other directly. Professor Green of the British Library's Tiny Esoterica Dept. described the find as 'a significant, possibly bordering on major, contribution to our understanding of the holographs of the Enlightenment'. Praise indeed.

Boston, December 1762

My Dear Hume,

It is with great joy that I pick up my pen to thank you for your elegant letter and to reply to a man, and, dare I say, a friend who has the Intellect for some discourse upon ideas. One of the philosophers, I think it was Plato, was wont to observe that he had rather been the veriest block in nature than the possessor of all knowledge without some intelligent being to communicate it to.

My long sea journey upon the Berwick lasted an arduous month for we spent a week becalmed in the Downs off Deal before a fair wind preserved us from certain madness. Our company was unsuitably mixed, with those who looked as if flight to the Colonies might save them from further iniquity, and men of affairs, attended by their sullen and seasick servants, who were voyaging to New England to inspect their investments. One dreary creature, a sotweed factor, under the delusion that his wit, in the form of stories of eternal length and disgusting licentiousness, was put on earth to entertain me proved so tiresome that there were times when I prayed a storm would send me deliverance by carrying us into the deep. The others passed the time with drinking, and the saying that if a man is ill natured he infallibly discovers it in liquor was daily put to the test and found to contain a melancholie truth. The master was almost the only man who stayed sober and, though his temper was genial, he had no more conversation than his binnacle.

I thank Providence that I had my set of Draughts and, of infinitely more worth, a handsome copy of your Treatise on Human Nature which you will be pleased to learn I found more industriously spread about the booksellers of London than your fearful letter from Edinburgh would suggest. Truly your determination to start with first principles and test them with the experimental method marks the triumph of Reason over bigotry, and on reading it, only the most stubborn will remain undeceived about man's Moral Nature. And yet.[Here follows 16 pages of argument taking Hume to task over his views on Justice and Political Society. These are omitted for reasons of tedium. Ed]

Forgive me for my unmannerly length, but the vast wastes of briny between us encourage me to fire my entire broadside as there is not time enough for a more subtle skirmish. I fear I have exerted my powers beyond their strength for I know - and please do not take this for that false humility that is the ploy of the hard-of-thinking sophists in the Coffee Houses - that if only you were here you would dazzle me with countervailing argument.

And yet I take some comfort from my recent meeting here in Boston with Jefferson. It is bitterly cold and Thomas and I sat round the fire at the Four Moggies (Mrs Roseberry, a barrel of a woman, kept our ale pots replenished) while we fired our ideas about your Treatise back and forth like grapeshot until all but we had staggered home. In passing I must mention that I have devised a stove that gives up more heat, employs fuel more effectually and does not fill the room with soot and vapours. [The Franklin Stove with minor modifications is still in use. - Ed.]

Jefferson will have none of the notion that the deformity of vice stems from man's innate Nature or that the beauty of virtue derives from the operation of Reason.
Jefferson is with you on what he calls the silly metaphysics of the ancients. Surely a Society true to the principles of natural justice and free from the tyranny of those given power by accident of birth will be inhabited by good men? The time must come when we will govern ourselves and Jefferson goes so far as to assert - tho for aught I know this is scarcely credible - that one day we may become a great nation as powerful as Britain herself.

Here in the Colonies we have for the first time in the historie of the world a chance to create a just republic and, as you have read in my letter, Jefferson has pressed his wit into service by inventing the perfect Constitution for it.
Your thoughts have given us cause for much debate and I have no doubt that the result will be a more equitable and sound document even tho I doubt that it will ever find a practical use - for surely the Crown would never be so foolish as to let the Colonies become disaffected. Jefferson's doodling over a declaration of independence is in like manner an exercise of theoretick notions of ideal polity and your criticism of the preamble is well made. Happiness is not something to which one lays a grievous siege; it is a blissful felicity to which one is sensible only after it has passed when it can be recollected in tranquillity.

Sir, you are doubtless right that to pursue it is a paradox guaranteed to make it vanish.
Jefferson and I have cudgelled our braynes trying to think of a better draft, but at the last we are resolved: the pursuit of happiness may be tosh, but, by God, it sounds good.

With admiration and affection,
yr Obedient Servant, Benjamin Franklin