Yet if Franklin was precocious, he was not foolish. Morris charged that the logical terminus of the Assembly’s line of argument was democracy—a concept that in the mid-eighteenth century was commonly equated with anarchy. Franklin would grow more democratic with age, but at this point he refused Morris’s bait. “We are not so absurd as to ‘design a Democracy,’ of which the Governor is pleased to accuse us,” he wrote. If anyone, it was Morris who was bringing democracy closer, by his adamancy in defense of the proprietors. “Such a conduct in a Governor appears to us the most likely thing in the
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