Not only was Benjamin Franklin a scientist, a printer, a businessman, a diplomat, a musician, a writer, and a Founding Father, he also had an uncanny ability to see results in advance. What do I mean? Read these words of his which were sent to George Washington to lift his spirits in the brutal winter of 1780. Ben was 74:

“I must soon quit this scene. But you may live to se our country flourish, as it will amazingly and rapidly after the war is over; like a field of young Indian corn, which long fair weather had enfeebled and discolored, and which in that weak state, by a thunder gust of violent wind, hail and rain, seemed to be threatened with absolute destruction; yet the storm being past, it recovers fresh verdure, shoots up with double vigor, and delights the eye, not of its owner only, but of every observing traveler.”

Then the next year the British surrendered at Yorktown. The war was over. The troops that had been beaten down like the corn Franklin described shot up with double vigor and flourished into history. Clear to “every observing traveler!”

Ben, of course, lived to be a part of the Constitutional Convention. Not only a part of it, but an influential voice.

What have we got? “A republic . . .if you can keep it!”