Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson Page B

should probably live a very easy life; and if all printers everywhere were so dealt by, there would be very little printed.”
    It was not in Franklin’s nature, however, to be dogmatic or extreme about any principle; he generally gravitated toward a sensible balance. The rights of printers, he realized, were balanced by their duty to be responsible. Thus, even though printers should be free to publish offensive opinions, they should generally exercise discretion. “I myself have constantly refused to print anything that might countenance vice or promote immorality, though…I might have got much money. I have also always refused to print such things as might do real injury to any person.”
    One such example involved a customer who asked the young printer to publish a piece in the Gazette that Franklin found “scurrilous and defamatory.” In his effort to decide whether he should take the customer’s money even though it violated his principles, Franklin subjected himself to the following test:
    To determine whether I should publish it or not, I went home in the evening, purchased a twopenny loaf at the baker’s, and with the water from the pump made my supper; I then wrapped myself up in my great-coat, and laid down on the floor and slept till morning, when, on another loaf and a mug of water, I made my breakfast. From this regimen I feel no inconvenience whatever. Finding I can live in this manner, I have formed a determination never to prostitute my press to the purposes of corruption and abuse of this kind for the sake of gaining a more comfortable subsistence.
    Franklin ended his “Apology for Printers” with a fable about a father and son traveling with a donkey. When the father rode and made his son walk, they were criticized by those they met; likewise, they were criticized when the son rode and made the father walk, or when they both rode the donkey, or when neither did. So finally, they decided to throw the donkey off a bridge. The moral, according to Franklin, was that it is foolish to try to avoid all criticism. Despite his “despair of pleasing everybody,” Franklin concluded, “I shall not burn my press or melt my letters.” 16
    Along with such high-minded principles, Franklin employed some more common strategies to push papers. One ever reliable method, which had particular appeal to the rather raunchy unmarried young publisher, was the time-honored truth that sex sells. Franklin’s Gazette was spiced with little leering and titillating items. In the issue a week after his “Apology for Printers,” for example, Franklin wrote about a husband who caught his wife in bed with a man named Stonecutter, tried to cut off the interloper’s head with a knife, but only wounded him. Franklin ends with a smirking pun about castration: “Some people admire that when the person offended had so fair and suitable opportunity, it did not enter his head to turn St-n-c-tt-r himself.”
    The next issue had a similar short item about an amorous constable who had “made an agreement with a neighboring female to watch with her that night.” The constable makes the mistake of climbing into the window of a different woman, whose husband was in another room. Reported Franklin: “The good woman perceiving presently by the extraordinary fondness of her bedfellow that it could not possibly be her husband, made so much disturbance as to wake the good man, who finding somebody had got into his place without his leave began to lay about him unmercifully.”
    And then there was the story of the sex-starved woman who wanted to divorce her husband because he could not satisfy her. She “at times industriously solicited most of the magistrates” to gain sympathy for her plight. After her husband was medically examined, however, she moved back in with him. “The report of the physicians (who in form examined his abilities and allowed him in every respect to be sufficient ) gave her but small satisfaction,” Franklin wrote.