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

delphia the people tore down the "late King's" arms from the State House and burned them in a bonfire on Independence Square. In New York the troops and citizens together, after hearing the Declaration read, proceeded to Bowling Green and dragged down the leaden equestrian statue of George III, which was melted up into bullets for patriot rifles. The citizens of Savannah, after a day of feasting, burned George III in effigy and read a mock funeral service over his grave. Uncertainties, timidities, inconsistencies were removed. The issue was clearly defined and the battle fairly joined. On July 9 George Washington published the Declaration to his army in New York with the following order: "The General hopes that this important event will serve as an incentive to every officer and soldier to act with fidelity and courage, as knowing now that the peace and safety of his country depend, under God, solely on the success of our arms." It is said that the Marseillaise was worth ten thousand men to the Jacobin generals of the French Revolution. Who shall say how many regiments the Declaration of Independence was worth to the great patriot who bore the burden of our tottering cause from Brooklyn Heights to Yorktown!

One other service of far-reaching importance the Declaration rendered to the American cause. It was a stroke of diplomacy. So long as we were fighting to reform the British Empire, the secret commit

tee on foreign correspondence appointed by Congress on November 29, 1775, could hardly expect any aid from European nations. But when the cause which we submitted to a "candid world" took the form of independence help came. As soon as Louis XVI's government heard that the American colonies had declared themselves free it proposed that France and Spain should begin war against Great Britain. Men and money began to come to us from France. In October our agent in Paris, Silas Deane, could ship to America a large amount of ammunition, thirty thousand muskets, and clothing for twenty thousand soldiers. The commission from the independent United States of America, which superseded Deane's agency in Paris at the close of 1776, made steady progress toward the negotiation of our first treaties of alliance and commerce. Jefferson had been asked to serve on this commission with Franklin and Deane, but another service, which we shall study in our next chapter, appealed to him with a clearer call, and Arthur Lee was substituted in his place. That foreign nations helped us for the destruction of the British Empire rather than for the establishment of the American Republic did not affect the value of their aid. What that value was every student of the American Revolution knows. Whether or not we should have eventually established our independence without the help of France it is impossible to say. So judicious a

scholar as Mr. Lecky believes that most of the States would have given up the struggle without this help. Although New England and Virginia might have kept up a valiant but desperate resistance for a time, "the peace party would soon have gained the ascendancy and the colonies have been reunited to the mother country."

The Declaration of Independence was a fitting climax to Jefferson's splendid campaign for political freedom, and would alone suffice to place him high in the honor-roll of the founders of the American state. It was a masterly condensation of the Summary View and the Reply to Lord North, thrown into the form of a stirring manifesto to the American people and the world at large. And its influence on America and the world at large has been beyond calculation. Even England herself, led astray for the moment by false counsels, was helped by its plain and ruthless lesson to regain the path of justice; for the Declaration was an appeal from an England badly governed to an England to be better governed. It was the voice of Milton speaking again. There is no need to introduce Rousseau and the French philosophers of the eighteenth century to explain Jefferson's language. "The natural rights of man" was a doctrine as old as the Roman law, and "government by consent of the governed" was the principle for which the "republicans" of the seventeenth century had fought their battle of four