While his little sister remained at home dipping candles and boiling soap, young Benjamin Franklin decided to thumb his nose at the government by printing excerpts from a work known as Cato’s Letters, written by two radicals, an Englishman, John Trenchard and a Scot, Thomas Gordon. Cato’s Letters comprises 144 essays about the nature of liberty, including freedom of speech and of the press. “Without freedom of thought,” Trenchard and Gordon wrote, “there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man.”
