Nor have we been wanting in attentions to our British brethren, we have warned them from time is time of attempts by their legislature to extend a juris. -diction over these our states we have reminded them of the circumstances of ner emigration & settlement here no. of which could warrant so strange a pretension: that these effected at the expence four own were one Blog & treasure, unassisted by the wealth or the strength of Great Britain. that in constituting indeed our several forms of government, we had adopted. one monking, thereby laying a foundation for perpetual linque & amity .. th them: but that submission to their cited: and five appealed to their native justice & magnanimity as well as to the tis kindred to disavow these usurpations which were likely Winterrupt w correspondence. thommation they too have been deaf to the voice of justice & We must thesoffre If consanguinity, & when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of 4 -laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power at this very very time too they permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our comme i lood, but Scotch & foreign mercenaries to invade Voltage these fact have given the last state to agonizing affection, and manly sprint bids us torenounce for ever these unfeeling brethren, we must endeavor to forget over former love for them, and to hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in in peace friends. We might have been a free & a great people together; but a commer nication of grandeur & of freedom it seems is below their dignity, be it so, since they to happiness, is open to us too, we will. will have it: the r apart from them, If to glory. de state, and acquiesce in the necessity which pronounces our arting dies [ternet] separation ! A it We therefore the representatives of the United States of America in General Con gress accombled do in the name by authority of the good people of these states ] do in them. Broject and renounce all allegiance & subjection to the kings of Great Mmilmen "Fall others who may hereafter claim by, through, or under them; we utterly, dissolve break off all political connection which may home heretofore his. sisted between us & the people or parliament of Great Britain; and, nd finally wards assert and declare these colonies to be free and independant states, full and that as free & independant states they shall hore after how power to levy ar, complude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, &f to do all other acts and things which independant states may of right do. And for the: support of this declaration we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Shine your sacred honour. its allegations in support of American Fhilip II. to the people of the Netherindependence are "false and frivolous." lands. 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 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. 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: “There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up-particularly that which called the 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." A more minute and more poignant criticism of the Declaration of Independence has been made in recent years by still another English writer of liberal tendencies, who, however, in his capacity as critic, seems here to labor under the disadvantage of having transferred to the document which he undertakes to judge much of the extreme dislike which he has for the man who wrote it, whom, indeed, 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 was intended to justify. Such is not the case, however, with the leading modern English critics of the same document, who, while blaming in severe terms the policy of the British government towards the thirteen colonies, have also found much to abate from the confidence due to this official announcement of the reasons for our secession from the empire. For example, Earl Russell, after frankly he regards as a sophist, as a demagogue, saying that the great disruption proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence was a result which Great Britain had “used every means most fitted to bring about," such as "vacillation in council, harshness in language, feebleness in execution, disregard of American sympathies and affections," also pointed out that the truth of this memorable declaration" was "warped" by "one singular defect "—namely, its exclusive and excessive arraignment of George III. "as a single and despotic tyrant," much like as quite capable of inveracity in speech, and as bearing some resemblance to Robespierre "in his feline nature, his malignant egotism, and his intense suspiciousness, as well as in his bloody-minded, yet possibly sincere, philanthropy." In the opinion of Prof. Goldwin Smith, our great national manifesto is written "in a highly rhetorical strain"; "it opens with sweeping aphorisms about the natural rights of man, at which political science now smiles, and which . . . might seem strange when framed for slave-holding |