“A republic ... if you can keep it.” We’ve all heard Benjamin Franklin’s famous “constitution day” line. But he wasn’t warning about government, or even the Constitution itself. He was warning us - about us. In his final speech at the Philadelphia Convention, Franklin also issued another warning - a dire prediction of how it would all end. In this episode, we dig into those warnings to understand what “keeping it” really meant to Franklin, Madison, Adams, Dickinson, and so many others who knew that words on paper would never be enough.