tion, Jefferson had included a rebuke of the King for his perpetuation of the American slave-trade. The section was stricken out. New England had hundreds of vessels engaged in the traffic, and the Southern planters had not kept pace with Jefferson in his emancipation sentiments. Another paragraph suppressed was the severe arraignment of the English people as "unfeeling bretheren," whose support of a tyrannical government had "given the last stab to agonized affections and forced us to endeavor to forget our former love for them." The passage was melodramatic and inopportune. Our quarrel was with George III and his Parliament, not with the English people. A comparison of Jefferson's original draft with the Declaration as amended and adopted leaves no doubt that the pruning process, however painful to the sensitive author, was wise and wholesome.

Jefferson states in that part of his Memoir which he claims was composed from notes taken at the time of the events that the Declaration was accepted by Congress on July 4, and "signed by every member present except Mr. Dickinson." But in this, as in many of the statements in the Memoir, he is mistaken-unless we take refuge with his devoted biographer, Mr. Randall, in the rather absurd supposition that in July all the members but one signed a paper which (in spite of its immense importance) soon disappeared from view, while several weeks

later considerable difficulty was experienced in getting them to sign the engrossed copy now preserved in the Department of State at Washington. Besides, Dickinson was not present in Congress on July 4, 1776. The wide-spread tradition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, with its attendant stories of Franklin's and Harrison's facetiousness, is due to the following curious fact. The secretary, Charles Thompson, in making up his minutes for the session of July 4, left a blank space for the text of the Declaration. The space was filled later by pasting into it a copy of the Declaration, to which were appended the names of the signers as they appeared on the engrossed copy. August 2 was the date on which most of the members actually signed. The original Declaration as sent out by Congress bore only the name of the president, John Hancock, written in the bold letters "which George III could read without his spectacles," and of the clerk, Charles Thompson.1

1 Some of the men whose names thus mistakenly appear as signers on July 4 were not present in Congress that day, and some were not even members of Congress then. The original Declaration, in the handwriting of Jefferson, as reported from the committee to Congress, is preserved with the Jefferson manuscripts in the Department of State. The engrossed copy, signed by the members, is also there, but since 1894 it has been kept from public view, in a steel case, to prevent further fading and cracking of the parchment. Jefferson made a number of copies of the Declaration in his own handwriting for various friends. Two of these copies are now in Washington, another was given by R. H. Lee to the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia, a fourth is in the Lenox Division of the Public Library of New York, a fifth in possession of the Massa

Many years after the Declaration was written, when Jefferson and Adams had become estranged by bitter partisan strife, the Massachusetts patriot, both in his Autobiography and in his letters, sought to belittle Jefferson's merits. He declared that he and Jefferson were both appointed as a subcommittee to make the draft; that they each urged the other to write it; that he finally persuaded his younger colleague to do the work because he was not only a better writer but was a Virginian and a "less obnoxious and suspected" ("distinguished"?) person than himself; and that finally, after some strictures on the document which Jefferson prepared, he "consented to report it" to the committee. As to the Declaration itself, Adams wrote to Pickering in 1822: "As you justly observe, there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. . . . Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams."

Jefferson's reply to these ungracious remarks of

chusetts Historical Society. Copies that we know from Jefferson's correspondence were given to Page, Pendleton, Wythe, and Mazzei have disappeared. A great number of facsimiles are in existence, two hundred having been made by order of Congress in 1824 and presented to the three surviving signers-Jefferson, Adams, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

the man who forty-six years earlier had stood by his side as "the Colossus of the Debate" on the adoption of the Declaration, is simply that the committee "unanimously pressed" him to write the draft, that he submitted it to Adams and Franklin for their corrections (which were trifling), that as to its merits he was not the judge. "Otis' pamphlet I never saw," he continues, "and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I only know that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiments which had ever been expressed before."

It is precisely the marvelous skill of Jefferson in focussing in sharp, distinct lines the wavering sentiment of independence that makes his document so great. For us the Declaration of Independence is the birth certificate of the American nation; for the men of 1776 it was a proclamation, a bugle-call. It cleared the air. Men were no longer to wonder how they could "own the King and fight against him at the same time,” as a Delaware patriot said. Hesitation was at an end. The Tories had been lagging brothers, fearful of treason to their King. The Declaration made them traitors to America. Caution and calculation had postponed the fatal step of separation from Great Britain. The middle colonies were lukewarm; decisive action might mean

their secession. And the same rash step that produced division at home would cement the union of Whigs and Tories in England. For the Whigs were our friends as long as we demanded reforms, but our enemies when we fell away from the empire. The same William Pitt who "rejoiced" that America had resisted the Stamp Act, declared a few years later that if he believed that the Americans entertained "the most distant intention of throwing off the legislative supremacy of Great Britain," he would be the first to enforce British authority "by every exertion the country was capable of making." In the compelling faith of freedom the Declaration risked the double danger of a disunited America and a united England. And its faith was justified.

Not all were won to the patriot cause. Careful students of the loyalist sentiment in the American Revolution believe that fully one-third of the population of the colonies held by the King. But the men who were waiting to have the issue clearly defined, the leaders who for a decade had felt the convictions of their heart growing to belie the professions of their lips, the soldiers who wanted to know finally for what they were fighting, hailed the Declaration with joy. It was read in courts and council halls, on public squares and village greens, from pulpits and platforms. It was received with processions, banquets, and salvos of cannon. In Phila