“Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”
Thus wrote Benjamin Franklin, 229 years ago today, on November 13, 1789. The recipient of his musings was one Jean-Baptiste Leroy, an eighteenth-century physicist and regular correspondent with Franklin. Like Franklin, he was fascinated by the science of electricity, and in 1749, he was a co-constructer of the electrometer, a device for detecting and measuring electrical charges and voltages. Thank you M. Leroy. I sing your praises every time I flip the circuit breaker, but then stick the little prongs of the pocket version of your invention into the outlet, or into the box, just to make absolutely sure I’m not going to send myself to kingdom come when I touch the bare wires. (I do loathe electrical projects. Messing with something I can’t see, which has the shocking power to send me instantly into the next world, fussels my boogie immensely.)
Although the death and taxes meme is most closely associated with Poor Richard, he didn’t originate it. That honor belongs to Christopher Bullock, and his play from 1716, The Cobbler of Preston, a Musical Farce in Two Acts, in the form, “’tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes.” I’ll confess I haven’t seen or read the thing, but can’t help wondering if one of the acts is “death” and the other one is “taxes,” and where the aspects of “farce” come in. Neither seems particularly funny to me. Sigh. I suppose I’ll have to get busy and start ferreting around to see if I can find a copy. That’s the trouble with these QOTD posts–start unraveling the knots, and you end up with loose threads, and in places you couldn’t possibly have anticipated. Sort of like life. Sometimes, it’s worth it, though. Sort of like life, again.
The phrase was also used by Daniel Defoe (he of Robinson Crusoe fame) in The Political History of the Devil, a book written in 1726. There, the sentence is “Things as certain as death and taxes can be more firmly believed.” I’ve not read that one either (gosh, my bluestocking credibility, such as it is, is going down the drain on this one), but from what I can gather, it’s a refutation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a history of the world as it’s been affected by the participation of the devil, who, in the service of evil, has physically put his thumb on the scale time and time again.
One must assume that, unlike my poor self, Ben Franklin was familiar with one, or both, of these almost contemporaneous pieces of popular literature. And that that’s where he acquired the phrase.
His particular turn on it does seem apt, though, in that he seems to be acknowledging the impermanence of almost all wordly things, and that he implies the possibility that, one day, the United States Constitution may fall victim to the affairs of men and the evanescence of time. Very topical today, one might say.
And reminiscent of another of his famous remarks, that made to a curious lady when leaving Independence Hall at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787:
Q: Well, Doctor, what have we got–a Republic or a Monarchy?
A: A Republic–if you can keep it.
Smart fellow, Old Ben. Prescient, even.
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