reconciliation with Parliament were becoming more patent with every month that passed. The King refused to receive the "olive branch petition" which Dickinson, Jay, and Wilson had persuaded Congress to send in July, 1775, as a last appeal to "his most gracious Majesty." Instead, he had declared the American colonies to be in a state of rebellion and sedition.1 He prohibited all trade and intercourse with them, bombarded and burned their towns (Falmouth and Norfolk), and hired German mercenaries to reduce them to obedience. In November, 1775, Parliament, by a vote of 83 to 33 in the Lords and 210 to 105 in the Commons, rejected motions for conciliation. On this side of the water there was no less determination. Congress maintained an army in active opposition to the royal governor of Massachusetts, made war contracts, granted military commissions, appointed a diplomatic committee to sound the courts of Europe for aid, and recommended to the patriots of New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Virginia to follow the lead of Massachusetts in establishing such forms of

1 When Benjamin Franklin returned to America in March, 1775, after ten years' official residence in London as "agent" of several colonies, he told the Americans how their petitions to the King were treated: "Transmitted to Parliament with a great heap of letters, newspapers, handbills, etc., and laid on the table undistinguished by any recommendation and unnoticed in the royal speech." In spite of Franklin's report, Congress addressed the throne in most obsequious language in its petition of July 8, 1775, two days after the Declaration on the Colonists Taking up Arms. John Dickinson was the author of both papers!

government as, in their judgment, would "best produce the happiness of the people and most effectually secure peace and good order during the continuance of the present dispute between Great Britain and the colonies." It is difficult to see what further act of sovereignty the colonists could perform. The inconsistency of such behavior with professions of loyalty to the crown was convincingly shown by Thomas Paine in his famous pamphlet, Common Sense (January, 1776), which urged the colonies to drop their sentimental attachment to a stupid King and a servile Parliament, and to wake to their prophetic mission as founders of a new nation destined to be vast and populous, an example of freedom and democracy to the whole world.

Thomas Paine's pamphlet was running into the tens of thousands, its "sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning" (the words are Washington's), stirring a new spirit of independence throughout the land, when Thomas Jefferson went up in May, 1776, to resume his seat in Congress. Already the ties which bound the colonies to England were snapping. The local committees of safety had virtually succeeded the King's officials in New England and the colonies south of the Potomac. Only the middle group-New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland-held firm in their allegiance, instructing their delegates in Congress as late as January, 1776, to resist any proposition for a separation from

Great Britain. On April 12 the convention of North Carolina authorized its delegates "to concur with the delegates of other colonies in declaring independency"; and a month later the Virginia Convention took the decisive step of instructing its delegates in Congress "to propose to that respectable body to declare the united colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to or dependence upon the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain." Mr. H. S. Randall, in his elaborate biography of Jefferson, thinks it likely that this momentous resolution of the convention of Virginia was connected with Jefferson's vacation from Congress, and he urges, among other reasons for his belief, that Jefferson's election to the first place on the committee chosen June 10 to draft a declaration of independence would scarcely be the reward bestowed on a prodigal returning after four and a half months of inglorious ease. At any rate, it is a pleasing surmise that the man who wrote the immortal document was influential in securing the introduction of the motion for independence, and there may have been more than a mere coincidence in the fact that appearance of the resolution in the Virginia Convention followed so hard upon the departure of Jefferson for Philadelphia.1

1 Mr. Randall might have added another weight to his scale of probabilities by quoting some of the abundant testimony of contemporary Virginians to the part played by the piedmont counties (where, of course, Jefferson was most influential) in the campaign

Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegation, introduced the triple motion into Congress, June 7, 1776, declaring our independence, recommending the solicitation of aid from foreign Powers, and urging the formation of a confederation to bind the colonies more closely together. The first clause was debated fiercely. "The Congress sat till seven o'clock this evening," wrote Rutledge to Jay, "in consequence of a motion of R. H. Lee's rendering ourselves free and independent States: the sensible part of the House opposed the Motion . . . I wish you had been here. The whole argument was sustained on the one side by R. Livingston, Wilson, Dickinson, and myself, and by the Power of all New England, Virginia and Georgia at the other." Jefferson produces a score or more of arguments on each side in brief synoptic paragraphs in his Memoir, and adds that since "the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and South Carolina were not yet matured for falling off from the parent stem, but were fast advancing to that state, it was thought most prudent to wait a while for them and to postpone the decision." At the same time a committee of

for independence. Mason wrote to R. H. Lee that the resolution of May 15 in the convention "was carried by the western vote," i. e., by the members living north and west of Richmond; and Jefferson himself wrote from Philadelphia to Thomas Nelson, just after taking his seat: "When at home I took great pains to inquire into the sentiments of the people on that head (independence]. In the upper counties I think I may say nine out of ten were for it."

five was appointed to draw up a Declaration of Independence to be adopted in case the motion should pass. Thomas Jefferson was chosen first on the committee, with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston following in the order named. In response to the unanimous request of his colleagues, Jefferson undertook to draft the paper.

To analyze the Declaration of Independence would be as gratuitous a piece of work as to analyze the Ten Commandments. It is the Bible of American democracy. The equality of all men in the eyes of nature and the law, the inalienable rights of all to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the function of government as a guarantee of those rights, its just powers derived from the consent of the governed-these are the political principles on which our republic is founded and from which it will draw its inspiration as long as it lives. Without them it would not be a republic; without them it would not be America.

Congress handled Jefferson's draft rather roughly in its debate of July 2-4, and the author confesses himself that he writhed a little under the acrimonious criticism of some of its parts. Very few additions were made, and those only of a few words, but some passages were suppressed. In the long list of indictments against the tyrannical conduct of George III, which comprise the body of the Declara