“Dr James McHenry, a delegate from Maryland, was at age thirty-four one of the youngest men at the [Constitutional] convention. As things were breaking up at the end of the last day, McHenry was privileged to witness a historic exchange —and soon afterwards recorded it in his notes, which have survived. If not for his notes, we would have no record that this exchange ever happened. So what did the young doctor write? McHenry wrote that when Benjamin Franklin emerged from the building that day, he was accosted by a certain Mrs. Powell of Philadelphia. Whether she was a young woman or a dowager we don’t know. He [Franklin] was then eighty-one, the oldest delegate, the éminence grise who for his part in those hallowed proceedings came to be known as the “sage of the Constitution”. Franklin had by that time lived in Philadelphia for sixty-four years since arriving there in 1723, aged seventeen, so for all we know, he knew this now-mythical and otherwise forgotten Mrs. Powell, who has come to stand for all of America since that day when she spoke to Franklin in a tone that seems to bespeak some degree of familiarity.
According to McHenry, Mrs. Powell put her question to Franklin directly: “Well, doctor,” she asked him, “what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
Franklin, who was rarely short of words or wit, shot back: “A republic madam — if you can keep it.”
~ Eric Metaxa “If You Can Keep It” (2016)
There are phrases that cannot be unheard, that burrow themselves deeply into the subconcious, make themselves at home, forge a million synaptic connections in the brain in short order and produce a new, sharper or reinvigorated perspective. “If you can keep it” is one of those.
“If you can keep it.”
Embedded in Franklin’s response to Mrs. Powell on the final day of the Constitutional Congress, convened for a hundred days to formulate the document and the principles upon which this newly created nation of United States was to be governed are three perspectives: A sense of fragility, a recognition that the thing to be be kept is far from guaranteed; a sense of ownership or perhaps better stewardship incumbent upon those who wish to preserve it; and a sense of indelegable collective and individual responsibility for that stewardship. Franklin is speaking to one person, and simultaenously speaking to the collective of indviduals that comprised the entirity of the newly conceived nation in all thirteen states.
Fragility, stewardship, individual responsibility: these are present aspects of every human endeavour. They are true of a marriage, of a family, of a business, of a fortune or inheritance, of a building, of a friendship, of a congregation, of a community, of an order as well as of a nation. Each of these are ours to have if we have chosen them or they have chosen us — if we can keep them. They are true of our health, mental, physical and spiritual, of our environment, of every facet of that which we have been gifted and which we deem good and necessary for our life, our freedoms and our happiness or pursuit of it. It is a cracking phrase.
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