Fair Trade?

March 7, 2001

A comprehensive biography, THE FIRST AMERICAN, The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, is an excellent scholarly achievement. It is no exaggeration to classify Benjamin Franklin a genius. He can be accurately called printer, editor, entrepreneur, electrical engineer and inventor, oceanographer, scientist, philosopher, diplomat, agitator, ladies man, and one of the principal founders of our Republic.

At least one of his proposals indicates he was a master of satire, too. (Brands, p. 215/16)

Around the 1750s, Philadelphia had a higher crime rate than other colonial cities because under the Quaker influence, there were less punitive laws. Franklin and other citizens were much concerned about public safety. Franklin proposed safety measures and better methods for the constable system. But this attention to safe streets missed the problem’s roots: the proliferation of criminals. Since the 17th century, the American colonies had been forced to serve as a dumping ground for criminals convicted in England.

Protests to England were ignored.

[In 1751,] David Hall’s “Gazette” reported [of] murders, mutiny, mayhem. Hall editorialized, “Britain! Thou art called Mother Country; but what good mother ever sent thieves and villains to accompany her children; to corrupt them with their infectious vices....”

Benjamin Franklin was equally outraged, but admitted that there might be grounds for asserting that with a change of environment “their natures may possibly change if they were to change the climate.”

Franklin wrote (could he have been serious?) that a bounty be paid to persons who would collect rattlesnakes and transport them to England. “There I would propose to have them carefully distributed in St. James Park ... and other places of pleasure in London; in the gardens of the nobility...; but particularly in the gardens of the Prime Ministers, the Lords of Trade and members of Parliament....”

Franklin pointed out that the British government considered the transportation of felons to the Colonies a matter of trade. “Trade required returns.... Yet the trade in serpents would not be quite equal, for snakes posted fewer dangers than felons. The rattlesnake gives warning before he attempts mischief, which the convict does not.” (p.216)

Does Franklin’s satire have any useful application today?

Our prisons are overcrowded. We have more persons behind bars than all the European nations combined. Could we imitate the England of colonial days and ship many of our criminals to other countries?

For example, with all the crime, distress and trouble caused by the flood of cocaine coming from Colombia, could we not send at least a few hundred criminals there? A parachute drop? Wouldn’t that be a fair exchange of trade?

But such fantastic speculations have no reality and are of course unworkable. The Colonies had to deal as best they could with the felons transported here by England. Their descendants, at least, became part of the incremental progress and prosperity of the United States.

We will solve our problems, or not solve them, depending on our foresight, wisdom, and readiness to face problems both openly and realistically, and to develop the will to embrace bold solutions and act.

In Hamlet at the opening of Act IV, Sc. iii, Claudius reflecting on his plotting, has a short soliloquy as he awaits Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, saying among other lines,

“Diseases desperate grown
By desperate appliance are relieved,
Or not at all.”

(P. S.): I neglected to mention on page one that the author of this fine biography is H. W. Brands)