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Franklin was pleased with this satire, which was a companion piece to “An Edict by the King of Prussia.”7 Both had the virtues, he believed, of brevity, comprehensiveness, and “out-of-the-way forms” that caught attention; but he preferred the “Rules” to the “Edict” for the breadth and variety of its contents and for “a kind of spirited ending of each paragraph.”8 His technique in the two was different: in this one he challenged his readers to see their government’s policy through colonial eyes; in the “Edict” he jolted them with the fiction that they were colonists themselves. The two essays had a single purpose, to induce the public to take a fresh look at the American problem. When Parliament reconvened in the autumn, that problem promised to be a major subject of discussion; and the sensational demand from Massachusetts for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver was sure, when it came before the Privy Council, to provoke a storm. Moderate counsels could never prevail unless the folly of past measures was exposed, and Franklin devoted himself to exposing it. At the top of his satirical bent he could not be ignored, and the initial public reaction to his efforts was gratifying. The issue of the Public Advertiser containing the “Edict” sold out immediately, and both satires were widely reprinted in England and then in America.9
What Franklin achieved is another matter. Satire is a poor instrument of persuasion, for the open-minded are likely to be entertained—perhaps shocked—rather than convinced, and the close-minded to be angered. He was aware of the danger. Although he hoped to turn a spotlight on colonial grievances in order to gain redress, he realized that the effect might be to make matters worse.1 For him personally that seems to have been the effect. The government dared not mention these attacks for fear of giving them even greater publicity, he concluded later, but they accounted in great part for the official fury unleashed upon him early in 1774.2
