For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving 118, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas, to be tried for pretended offences:

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.

Britain is, and ought to be, totally dis-
solved; and that, as free and independent
States, they have full power to levy war,
conclude peace, contract alliances, estab-
lish 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 mu-
tually pledge to each other our lives, our
fortunes, and our sacred honor.

Congress.
Signed by order and in behalf of the

JOHN HANCOCK, President.
Attested, CHARLES THOMPSON, Secretary.

New Hampshire.

to our British brethren. We have warned STEPHEN HOPKINS, WILLIAM ELLERY.

In every stage of these oppressions we JOSIAH BARTLETT, have petitioned for redress in the most

WILLIAM WHIPPLE,

MATTHEW THORNTON.

humble terms; our petitions have been

answered only by repeated injury. A

Massachusetts Bay.

prince whose character is thus marked SAMUEL ADAMS,

JOHN ADAMS,

by every act which may define a tyrant, ROBERT TREAT PAINE,

ELBRIDGE GERRY.

is unfit to be ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention

Rhode Island, Etc.

them, from time to time, of attempts

Connecticut.

made by their legislatures to extend an
unwarrantable jurisdiction over us.
have reminded them of the circumstances
of our emigration and settlement here.

We

WILLIAM WILLIAMS, OLIVER WOLCOTT.

We have appealed to their native justice WILLIAM FLOYD, and magnanimity, and we have conjured FRANCIS LEWIS,

them, by the ties of our common kindred,

to disavow these usurpations, which would

inevitably interrupt our connections and RICHARD STOCKTON, JOHN WITHERSPOON,

correspondence. They, too, have been FRANCIS HOPKINSON,

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.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in general Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the recti

tude of our intentions, do, in the name ROBERT MORRIS,
and by the authority of the good people BENJAMIN FRANKLIN,
of these colonies, solemnly publish and GEORGE CLYMER,
declare that these united colonies are, GEORGE TAYLOR,
and of good right ought to be, free and
independent States; that they are ab-
solved from all allegiance to the British

JOHN MORTON,

JAMES SMITH,

WILLIAM PACA,

GEORGE Ross.

GEORGE READ,

THOMAS M'KEAN.

crown, and that all political connection CAESAR RODNEY, between them and the states of Great

Delaware.

SAMUEL CHASE,

Maryland.

THOMAS STONE,

CHARLES CARROLL OF CARROLLTON.

GEORGE WYTHE,

Virginia.

RICHARD HENRY LEE,

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 sophomorie period of our national life, a period which, as we flatter ourselves, we have now outgrown.

THOMAS JEFFERSON,
BENJAMIN HARRISON
THOMAS NELSON, JR.,
FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE,
CARTER BRAXTON.
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:

It can hardly be doubted that some hinderance to the right estimate of the Declaration of Independence is оссаsioned 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 writing lifted up into inordinate renown

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 enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, 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.

One of the earliest and ablest of its 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 Philip 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.

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 saying that the great disruption proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence was a result which Great Britain

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, he regards as a sophist, as a demagogue, as quite capable of inveracity in speech, and as bearing some resemblance to Robespierre "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