Only a scant and haaphazard selection of the letters to the press and other newspaper pieces that Benjamin Franklin published as a colonial agent in England, on the eve of the American Revolution, has hitherto been recover.since 1779 this has reminded the great hiaatus in the canon of his contemporaneously printed writings. of all the editors of his political essays,it was the first, Benjamin Vaughan, working in london during the war of Independence, who took the most pains to gather the "papers upon American subjects during the Troubles". but even with Franklin's aid, by correspondence from Passy, this English editor was frustrated:by the war, and by the fact that Franklin had left his manuscripts in Pennsylvania and other pieces in the keeping of his Tory Son. If these could be recovered, he told Vaughan, " I think there may be enough to make three more such Volumes, of which a great part would be more interesting".