In one of the world’s great success stories Ben Franklin adverts to a resounding failure with which his name is associated. Quoting from Dryden’s rendition of a Juvenal Satire, he counsels us:

Franklin’s brain child, the Albany Plan of Union, failed of adoption because neither the colonists nor the mother country knew their own good. “Such mistakes are not new,” the scientist-statesman reflects in his Autobiography. “History is full of the errors of states and princes.” The best measures of statesmanship, he shrewdly remarks, are seldom “adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.”

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