still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under these censures; for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."

It is easy now to say, that, in slurring over the fact of slavery, they made a fearful mistake; that they fastened upon the front of liberty a stigma that only the blood of the nation could wash out. It is easy to say, that with a higher faith in right and duty, a nobler courage and sacrifice for man, a loftier vision of the future, they would have set freedom and humanity a century forward. Can we be so sure of this? Let us not bedaub their sturdy work with our cheap rhetoric. They were honest, and did what they could. Their call was to make a nation; and, spite of all defects, they did make a nation, in whose fibre freedom and manhood were so ingrained, that, when recalled to the consciousness of its first principles, the nation was capable of restoring the rights of man at cost of three thousand million dollars and three hundred thousand lives. "Cursed be he that setteth light by his fathers; and let all the people say, Amen." 2

That the rumor of erecting the Colonies into an episcopate of the Established Church fired the zeal for revolution, we have the explicit testimony of John Adams, who says that "this contributed as much as any other cause to arouse the attention, not only of the inquiring mind, but of the common people, and urge them to close thinking on the constitutional authority of Parliament over the Colonies;" and in 1768 the Assembly of the Province of Mas

1 Works, vol. i. 19. 8 Works, x. 185.

2 Deut. xxvii. 16.

"If Parliament could tax us, they could establish the Church of England, with all its creeds, articles, tests, ceremonies, and titles, and prohibit all other churches as conventicles and schism-shops' (Jolin Adams: Works, x. 287). This pretence was, in fact, set up by Dr. Sherlock, Bishop of London, in a letter to the king in council, February, 1759: "The Church of England being established in America, the Independents, and other dissenters who went to settle in New England, could only have a toleration" (Colonial Documents of New York, vii. 360). The bishop seems to have argued in this wise: The name Virginia was at first vaguely given to the whole coast of North America between the thirtyfourth and the forty-fifth degrees of north latitude; that is, from Cape Fear to Halifax. In the charter of the actual Colony of Virginia, it was stipulated that religion should be established according to the doctrine and rites of the Church of England; and now, a hundred and fifty years later,

sachusetts instructed their agent in London strenuously to oppose such an episcopate, as a peril to liberty, civil and religious. Though this grievance was not named in the Declaration, the founders of the government provided against such a peril by abolishing all religious tests for political office, and enacting that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

But as their excessive caution in regard to slavery entailed upon the nation the conflict of a century, so this unbounded confidence in liberty threatens the opening century with conflict with a spiritual despotism that seeks to use the forms of freedom for controlling the votes, the schools, the laws, the moneys, of the republic, in the interest of a foreign potentate the most absolute and unyielding. Yet the principles of the Declaration are equal to this emergency. A new danger will rouse Americans once more to the consciousness of their history and of their trust; and the nation that first emancipated itself from political despotism, and next from domestic when the boundaries of Virginia were definitely fixed, and other Colonies had their limits and their rights defined by charters, the bishop put forth the preposterous claim, that, by virtue of the first charter of Virginia, the Church of England should be held to be established in New England also. How the people of Boston relished this doctrine is shown by a caricature in the Political Register of 1769, entitled An Attempt to land a Bishop in America. A ship is at the wharf: the lord-bishop is in full canonicals, his carriage, crosier, and mitre on deck. The people appear with a banner inscribed with "Liberty and Freedom of Conscience," and are shouting, "No lords, spiritual or temporal, in New England!" "Shall they be obliged to maintain bishops that cannot maintain themselves?" They pelt the bishop with Locke, Sidney on Government, Barclay's Apology, Calvin's Works; and the unhappy prelate is glad to take refuge in the shrouds, crying, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace." This protest was not against a church, but against an enforced Establishment; and the books show in what strong reading the colonists were nourished. (See the picture in Thornton's Pulpit of the American Revolution.)

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was active in this scheme for establishing the Church through an American episcopate, to be supported, of course, by tithes. In October, 1776, Dr. Charles Inglis, Rector of Trinity Church, New York, wrote to the society, "The present rebellion is certainly one of the most causeless, unprovoked, and unnatural that ever disgraced any country. Although civil liberty was the ostensible object, yet it is now past all doubt that an abolition of the Church of England was one of the principal springs of the dissenting leaders' conduct." He testifies that "all the society's missionaries in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, have proved themselves faithful, loyal subjects," shutting up their churches rather than cease praying for the king; and he urges the episcopate as an encouragement to such fidelity (Doc. Hist. of New York, iii. 637 seq.).

1 Life of Sam. Adams, i. 157.

slavery, will vindicate the independence of society and the state against the worse tyranny of ecclesiastical interference and control. Just because, in the immortal concept of the Declaration, man is a spiritual creation, endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of good, so much the more must society keep intact its spiritual organism, its moral personality, the independence of which is life, liberty, happiness.

NOTE.

SINCE the foregoing Lecture was prepared for the press, I have had the pleasure of reading the more prominent orations which the celebration of the Centenary of Independence called forth in the United States, - that of the Hon. William M. Evarts at Philadelphia, that of the Rev. R. S. Storrs, D.D., at New York, that of the Hon. Charles Francis Adams at Taunton, and that of the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop at Boston. It is a fine testimony to the Declaration as a document of political ethics, that it could furnish to minds of such high and varied powers the theme of thoughtful and admiring discourse from so many different points of view. Neither orator crossed the track of the others, nor did the orations run in parallel lines of thought; yet each found in the Declaration—its antecedents, its incidents, its principles, its results- - matter for a discourse of more than ordinary fulness and power; and it is only when one has read the whole four of these masterful productions, and gathered into one their total impressions, that he begins to realize how great an event, in history, in philosophy, and in the political and social ordering of the world, was the utterance that went forth from Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July, 1776. All these orators have passed the period of youthful enthusiasm, and neither of them was ever addicted to extravagance of speech. They have had large training and experience in law, divinity, statesmanship, letters, history; yet with every one of them the theme tasked the powers of the orator, as it before had tasked Choate, Everett, Webster. Nothing that was said about the Declaration could approach the silent eloquence of the instrument itself, as the original parchment, with the autographs of John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Oliver Wolcott, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Thomas Jefferson, and the sixfold row of worthies, was held up to the gaze of thousands on the spot where it was first read to the people. It could have been said of this parchment, as Webster said of the Bunker-hill Monument, 'It is itself the orator of this occasion. . . . It looks, it speaks, it acts, to the full comprehension of every American mind, and the awakening

...

of glowing enthusiasm in every American heart, surpassing all that the study of the closet, or even the inspiration of genius, can produce. Its speech is of patriotism and courage, of civil and religious liberty, of free government, of the moral improvement and elevation of mankind, and of the immortal memory of those who, with heroic devotion, have sacrificed their lives for their country."1 The Declaration was one of those epoch-making events whose influence can be measured only with

"The golden compasses, prepared In God's eternal store to circumscribe This universe and all created things."

Having finished the preceding analysis of the Declaration before I was favored with the light which these several orators have thrown upon it, I prefer to let that stand as it was, and to put into the form of a supplementary note such further reflections as the orations have awakened. It is with diffidence that I set forth, or rather emphasize, another interpretation of the instrument than any made prominent by my scholarly colleagues; and it is with deference that I diverge at any point from their historical perspective of the event and its results. These orators agree in separating the philosophical substance of the Declaration from the political reasons given for declaring the Colonies "free and independent States." The whole virtue of the instrument lies in the first sentence of the second paragraph, beginning, "We hold these truths to be self-evident." Of this Mr. Adams says, "I have considered these significant words as vested with a virtue so subtle as certain ultimately to penetrate the abodes of mankind all over the world; but I separate them altogether from the solemn array of charges against King George which immediately follow in the Declaration." Now, to maintain for the Declaration its just place in political philosophy and among the few great historic charters of human freedom, we must be careful, on the one hand, not to claim for it too much, whether in intent or in result, and, on the other hand, not to obscure the essential truths of the instrument by forms or acts that were but incidental or consequential. In particular, we should not look to the Declaration for too much of novelty in political theory, nor too absolute a transformation in political forms. Mr. Evarts, for instance, quotes with approval the saying of Burke, “A great revolution has happened, — a revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in any of the existing States, but by the appearance of a new State, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It has made as great a change in all the relations and balances and gravitations of power as the appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar world." Applied to the Constitution of the United States, which went into effect in 1789, this simile would be as accurate as it is beautiful that did indeed mark "a new species" of political organization. But democracy was not new, a republic was not new, at the time of the Revolution. Burke was not ignorant of the precedents in Greek and Roman history, in the Italian republics, in the Federation of the Swiss, in the Dutch Republic; all which exempli

1 Works of Daniel Webster, i. 86.

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fied more or less the doctrine of popular government. The American Revolution did not. like its successor in France, begin with a proclamation of the republic as thenceforth to mark a new era in the calendar, and give date to all decrees. Concerning forms of government, the Declaration is absolutely silent. It utters the voice of “a free people" resolved to disown a "tyrant" who is "unfit to be their ruler;" but it does not propose any change of government more specific than the quiet and orderly transformation of the "United Colonies" into "free and independent States." The act dissolving "all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain,” though it constituted "a new State," did not create "a new species

of State.

"The arts,

Neither is it quite correct to speak of the Declaration as having abolished from American society all castes, ranks, orders, and all hereditary titles, privileges, and distinctions, whether of State or Church. In truth, excepting the occasional attempt of some royal governor or council to ape an aristocracy, none of these things existed in the Colonies, nor had been there from their first foundation. sciences, and literature of England, came over with the settlers. That great portion of the common law which regulates the social and personal relations and conduct of men came also. The jury came; the habeas corpus came; the testamentary power came; and the law of inheritance and descent came also, except that part of it which recognizes the rights of primogeniture, which either did not come at all, or soon gave way to the rule of equal partition of estates among children. But the monarchy did not come, nor the aristocracy, nor the church, as an estate of the realm. Political institutions were to be framed anew, such as should be adapted to the state of things. But it could not be doubtful what should be the nature and character of these institutions. A general social equality prevailed among the settlers; and an equality of political rights seemed the natural, if not the necessary, consequence." 1 Thus the whole history and training of the colonists had established the fact that Burke read with such philosophic clearness, "that the disposition of the people of America is wholly averse to any other than a free government." 2 Hence it was no novelty to them, no creation of "a new species" of State in severing the one tie that held them in nominal allegiance to the throne, to cut loose from an established church, an hereditary peerage, and every artificial caste and privileged order in the State. Living without these, they had naturally developed and strengthened that liberty, which, as Englishmen, they had inherited and enjoyed, without, perhaps, looking farther back than to Magna Charta for its origin and justification. Indeed, at the outset, what Mr. Burke said of the English Revolution was quite as true of the American,-"The Revolution was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty." Indeed, Mr. Burke himself said he

1 Daniel Webster, Oration on the Completion of the Bunker-hill Monument: Works, i. 101.

2 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 1777.

3 Reflections on the Revolution in France.