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I. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one' people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,

2. And to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,

3. A decent respect to the opinion of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Psychologically speaking, this paragraph, portion 3, is modest and manly in a touching degree-a decent respect to the opinion of mankind. They felt and were conscious that should they be successful, they would enter as a full member into the commonwealth of nations, formed by our Cis-Caucasian race. Politically speaking, this head and sign of the declaration is thoroughly national. When for one people, says portion 1, it becomes necessary to disconnect itself from another, it is plainly putting the two as two nations-so we would express it now-opposite each other. Nor ought we to pass over the fact that, according to the original draft of the declaration by Jefferson, with his own erasures and changes, he had written first for a people, but erased a and put one above it with a caret. Portion 2 strongly confirms this. The subject bears repetition, and the state of things even down to our own times requires it; the first paragraph of the declaration is exclusively as well as emphatically national, but it does not stop there.

Paragraph 28, one item in the enumeration of the wrongs which the declaration lays to the king of England reads thus: "He (the king) has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands."

The italicizing in this or any coming passage is the author's own, simply to direct the student's attention to the words. The declaration is so great a document that even this outward change seemed to require explanation.

Fellow-citizen, country, brethren-these are strong words of exclusively national meaning. If brother is used in a political sense, what else can it mean but a person most closely allied either by birth in the same country, considered in the sense of political organization, or by the polity of the land, or by both? It is but another term for fellow-citizen used in the same paragraph. Men belonging to different sovereignties have never been called, nor can they be called, fellow-citizens. No Bavarian would have called a Prussian, under the late, now happily destroyed, state of Germany, his Mitbürger. The real meaning of brethren in this declaration is made clear by the beginning of paragraph 31, which is," Nor have we been wanting in attentions1 to our British brethren." They were our brethren when we belonged to the same great polity, but now we call our American fellow-citizens alone brethren.

Paragraph 33 pronounces us again a nation, by declaring the king of England “a prince unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

Throughout the charges against the king of England, which begin with paragraph 3 and go to 31, inclusive, the comprehensive word our is used for that of all Americans. Paragraph 26 says, "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people."

In paragraph 25, where the old and bitter use of the word abdication, first used against James II. in 1688, is taken up, it is said, "He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us." Here has no other meaning than this side the Atlantic, or America, our country.

Paragraph 15 speaks of "jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution."

Paragraph 31 concludes with the words, "We must, therefore acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies war, in peace, friends."

in

Not attention in the singular, as is even printed in Hickey's Constitution, partly published by congress, in 1847.

The declaration expresses a manly regret at the necessity of separation.

But what is our separation? Did each little colony separate individually, and were the English declared henceforth enemies in war to each colony, or to each individual, or did it mean enemies to us as a whole? The war power has never existed with us except in the whole-as an attribute of national sovereignty. Who are the "rest of mankind"? Individuals or nations? Who are "them," the single English or the English people as a political entirety? The whole as quoted here has a national meaning, and a national meaning alone. If the questions put here appear ludicrous, it must be observed that the risible element has not been arbitrarily introduced, but, on the contrary, all that is so contrary to the gravity of truth has been assumed and urged.

After the declaration had been signed, congress adopted the following resolution: "That copies of the declaration be sent to the several assemblies, conventions, and committees or councils of safety, and to the several commanding officers of the continental troops; that it be proclaimed in each of the United States and at the head of the army"-a national trumpet blast, or, if not, an insolent presumption. Which was it? Congress, the representative of the nation, does the highest civil act that can be done; it pronounces the birth of a nation, and orders it to be made known to all political bodies, large or small-assemblies, and councils of safety, civil and military, ordering it to be proclaimed "in each of the United States and at the head of the army"-without previously submitting the potent document to any person or body of persons. It is a sovereign blast of nationality. There was no pre-existing state sovereignty, no self-existing sovereign atom of our polity. The nation was born.

I cannot conclude this section without giving the words of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, soldier and statesman, "at one time an authority of unbounded reverence in South Carolina." In the South Carolina legislature in 1788, when the futility of the Articles of the Confederation had been proved and the

question about the adoption of the Constitution was before the different legislatures, Cotesworth Pinckney said: "This admirable manifesto (the Declaration of Independence) sufficiently refutes the doctrine of the individual sovereignty and independence of the several states. In that declaration the several states are not even enumerated; but after reciting, in nervous language, and with convincing arguments, our rights to independence, and the tyranny which compelled us to assert it, the declaration is made in the following words, etc. The separate independence and individual sovereignty of the several states were never thought of by the enlightened band of patriots who framed this declaration. The several states are not even mentioned by name in any part, as if it was intended to impress the maxim on America that our freedom and independence arose from our union, and that without it we never could be free or independent. Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this union by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent as a species of political heresy which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses." The nation and independence are born together. No centralization has ever existed with us; no assumption of petty sovereignty, either, that did not speedily lead to rebellion.

The history of the Declaration of Independence, the growth of the ideas, and the positive facts gained by it are rarely studied with sufficient care and comprehensiveness. Nor must the American suffer himself to be deterred from a profound study of this document by the endless balderdash repeated a hundred thousand times every year. Harper's Weekly of July 3, 1858, has a most interesting fac-simile of Jefferson's draft, with all his corrections. It shows that Jefferson drew up the declaration with much care, as it was adopted with like calmness of care. There was no passion or haste in the momentous transaction, no acclamation by a collection of men having degenerated into a vociferous mob. The signers were gentlemen and collected as advocates of a high degree are. They were young men.

* Debates in South Carolina (Miller), page 43. I quote from the Appendix to The Union, a Sermon delivered on the Day of National Fast, January 4, 1861, by T. H. Taylor, D.D. He was a South Carolinian, and settled in New York.

I have made a calculation of the average of the signers of the Decla ration of Independence. There were

One Irishman and one Virginian did not know their age, or rather others did not know it.

The average age of the signers was 44%, reminding us of the passage in the despatch of the Venetian ambassador in France, written in 1561, and given by Leopold Ranke, page 16, vol. iii. of The Popes of Rome. Micheli writes to the doge of Venice these remarkable words from France in 1561: "Your highness be convinced that, excepting the common people, who continue zealously to visit the churches, all the others have fallen off (from the old faith), especially the nobility and the younger men under forty years of age, almost without exception."

The Declaration of Independence as a Bill of Rights.

The Declaration of Independence, besides being considered in its potent national character, may be viewed in the light of political philosophy and as a quasi bill of rights. Indeed, it has been called the bill of rights of our Constitution; while others, and a most prominent American statesman among them, have declared the paragraph in question mere amiable, useless generality. The second paragraph begins thus:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it and to institute new government,' laying its foundation on such principles and

The original is as here printed, but most editions have governments (in the plural).