its allegations in support of American Philip II. to the people of the Netherindependence are false and frivolous." lands. This temperate criticism from an able and a liberal English statesman of the nineteenth century may be said to touch the very core of the problem as to the historic justice of our great indictment of the last King of America; and there is deep significance in the fact that this is the very criticism upon the document, which, as John Adams tells us, he himself had in mind when it was first submitted to him in committee, and even when, shortly afterwards, he advocated its adoption by Congress. After mentioning certain things in it with which he was delighted, he adds: A better-written, and, upon the whole, a more plausible and a more powerful, arraignment of the great declaration was the celebrated pamphlet by Sir John Dalrymple, The Rights of Great Britain Asserted against the Claims of America: Being an Answer to the Declaration of the General Congress-a pamphlet scattered broadcast over the world at such a rate that at least eight editions of it were published during the last three or four months of the year 1776. Here, again, the manifesto of Congress is subjected to a searching examination, in order to prove that "the facts are either wilfully or ignorantly misrepresented, and the arguments deduced from premises that have no foundation in truth." It is up-particularly that which called the doubtful if any disinterested student of history, any competent judge of reasoning, will now deny to this pamphlet the praise of making out a very strong case against the historical accuracy and the logical soundness of many parts of the Declaration of Independence. "There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it King tyrant. I thought this too personal; for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature. I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity only cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but, as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards, I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it." Undoubtedly, the force of such censures is for us much broken by the fact that they proceeded from men who were themselves partisans in the Revolutionary controversy, and bitterly hostile to the whole movement which the declaration A more minute and more poignant critiwas intended to justify. Such is not the cism of the Declaration of Independence case, however, with the leading modern has been made in recent years by still English critics of the same document, another English writer of liberal tenwho, while blaming in severe terms the dencies, who, however, in his capacity as policy of the British government towards critic, seems here to labor under the disthe thirteen colonies, have also found advantage of having transferred to the much to abate from the confidence due to document which he undertakes to judge this official announcement of the reasons much of the extreme dislike which he has for our secession from the empire. For for the man who wrote it, whom, indeed, example, Earl Russell, after frankly he regards as a sophist, as a demagogue, saying that the great disruption pro- as quite capable of inveracity in speech, claimed by the Declaration of Indepen- and as bearing some resemblance to Robesdence was a result which Great Britain pierre "in his feline nature, his malig. had "used every means most fitted to nant egotism, and his intense suspiciousbring about," such as "vacillation in ness, as well as in his bloody-minded, yet council, harshness in language, feebleness possibly sincere, philanthropy." In the in execution, disregard of American sym- opinion of Prof. Goldwin Smith, our great pathies and affections," also pointed out national manifesto is written "in a highthat "the truth of this memorable decla- ly rhetorical strain"; "it opens with ration" was warped" by "one singular sweeping aphorisms about the natural defect"-namely, its exclusive and ex- rights of man, at which political science cessive arraignment of George III. as now smiles, and which . . . might seem a single and despotic tyrant," much like strange when framed for slave-holding 66 |