Whereas Dr. Franklin in a letter dated March 12th 1781. represented to Congress that he had passed his 75th Year and that he found that the long and severe fits of the gout which he had the last winter had shaken him exceedingly, that he was sensible of great diminution in his activity, “a quality particularly necessary in a minister of Congress to the Court of Versailles”—that he was afraid therefore that these affairs might sometime or other suffer by his deficiency; that he also found the business too heavy for him and too confining; that he had been engaged in public affairs and enjoyed public confidence in some shape or other during the long term of fifty years, an honour sufficient to satisfy any reasonable ambition, and that he had now no other left but that of repose which he hoped the Congress would grant him by sending some person to supply his place; — — in a letter dated April 15th 1783. that “Mr. Barclay is often ill, and I am afraid the settlement of our accounts will be in his hands a long operation. I shall be impatient at being detained here on that score after the arrival of my successor;”—in another letter dated July 22nd. 1783. “I have received no answer yet from Congress to my request of being dismissed from their service. They should methinks reflect that if they continue me here, the faults I may henceforth commit through the infirmities of age will be rather theirs than mine;”—And in a letter to Mr. Carmichael dated Passy Decr. 15th 1783 he writes thus “I am too much harassed by a variety of correspondence together with gout and gravel which induces me to postpone doing what I often fully intend to do;—“my sitting too much at the desk having already almost killed me,”—Therefore Resolved, that, in compliance with the repeated applications of Dr. Franklin for a dismission from public employment on account of the pains and infirmities which accompany his old age, and that he may enjoy that repose which a long series of years spent in the service of his country entitle him to expect, he be permitted to retire from public service.