GARDEN HOUSE IN WHICH JEFFERSON AND OTHERS CELEBRATED THE PASSAGE OF THE DECLARATION, For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury: For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences: For abolishing the free system of English law in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies: For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our government: For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has abdicated government here by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, to complete the works of death, desolation, and TABLE AND CHAIR USED AT THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. tyranny, already begun, with circum- Britain is, and ought to be, 'totally dis stances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. He 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. He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. solved; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. Signed by order and in behalf of the Congress. JOHN HANCOCK, President. Attested, CHARLES THOMPSON, Secretary. New Hampshire. In every stage of these oppressions we JOSIAH BARTLETT, WILLIAM WHIPPLE, have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A MATTHEW THORNTON. prince whose character is thus marked SAMUEL ADAMS, Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them, from time to time, of attempts made by their legislatures to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war-in peace, friends. JOHN ADAMS, ELBRIDGE GERRY. Rhode Island, Etc. Connecticut. ROGER SHERMAN, SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, New York. WILLIAM FLOYD, PHILIP LIVINGSTON, New Jersey. WILLIAM ABRAHAM CLARK. HOOPER, JOSEPH HEWES, JOHN PENN. Georgia. BUTTON GWINNETT, LYMAN HALL, GEORGE WALTON. Pennsylvania. ROBERT MORRIS, We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare that these united colonies are, and of good right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection CAESAR RODNEY, between them and the states of Great BENJAMIN RUSH, GEORGE ROss. Delaware. GEORGE READ, THOMAS M'KEAN. SAMUEL CHASE, Maryland. THOMAS STONE, GEORGE WYTHE, Virginia. RICHARD HENRY LEE, THOMAS JEFFERSON, for such an act, he characterized it as JAMES WILSON, made up of "glittering and sounding generalities of natural right." What the great advocate then so unhesitatingly suggested, many a thoughtful American since then has at least suspected-that our great proclamation, as a piece of political literature, cannot stand the test of modern analysis; that it belongs to the immense class of over-praised productions; that it is, in fact, a stately patch-work of sweeping propositions of somewhat doubtful validity; that it has long imposed upon mankind by the well-known effectiveness of verbal glitter and sound; that, at the best, it is an example of florid political declamation belonging to the sophomoric period of our national life, a period which, as we flatter ourselves, we have now outgrown. South Carolina. EDWARD RUTLEDGE, THOMAS HEYWARD, JR., THOMAS LYNCH, JR., ARTHUR MIDDLETON. Declaration of Independence in the Light of Modern Criticism, THE. As a student, critic, and compiler of American history Prof. Moses Coit Tyler holds an established position among the most eminent scholars. In 1867 he was appointed to the chair of English Literature at the University of Michigan, which he occupied until 1881, when he was called to the University of Cornell as Professor of American History. On the subject of criticisms on the Declaration of Independence he writes: stance, it has been censured for its form, for its misstatements of fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally for its grandiose and vaporing style. Nevertheless, it is to be noted that whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the world, has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its first appearance, or since then; a fact which seems to tell in favor of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again and again, either in anger or in contempt, by friends as well as by It can hardly be doubted that some enemies of the American Revolution, by hinderance to the right estimate of the liberals in politics as well as by conserDeclaration of Independence is occa- vatives. It has been censured for its subsioned by either of two opposite conditions of mind, both of which are often to be met with among us: on the one hand, a condition of hereditary, uncritical awe and worship of the American Revolution, and of that state paper as its absolutely perfect and glorious expression; on the other hand, a later condition of cultivated distrust of the Declaration as a piece of One of the earliest and ablest of its writing lifted up into inordinate renown assailants was Thomas Hutchinson, the by the passionate and heroic circumstances last civil governor of the colony of Massaof its origin, and ever since then extolled chusetts, who, being stranded in London beyond reason by the blind energy of by the political storm which had blown patriotic enthusiasm. Turning from the him thither, published there, in the former state of mind, which obviously autumn of 1776, his Strictures Upon the calls for no further comment, we may Declaration of the Congress at Philanote, as a partial illustration of the latter, delphia, wherein, with an unsurpassed that American confidence in the supreme knowledge of the origin of the controintellectual merit of this all-famous docu- versy, and with an unsurpassed acumen ment received a serious wound from the in the discussion of it, he traverses the hand of Rufus Choate, when, with a cour- entire document, paragraph by paraage greater than would now be required graph, for the purpose of showing that its allegations in support of American Fhilip 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 malighad “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 |