Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/206

 174 The Declaration of Independence. [me of independence. Accordingly, on July 4, 1776, Congress passed the resolution which made the colonies independent communities, issuing at the same time the well-known Declaration of Independence. If we regard the Declaration as the assertion of an abstract political theory, criticism and condemnation are easy. It sets out with a general proposi- tion so vague as to be practically useless. The doctrine of equality of men, unless it be qualified and conditioned by full reference to special circumstance, is either a barren truism or a delusion. But, though this limitation is not explicitly stated, it is present. We must judge the opening sentence with reference to what follows and to the actual facts present in the minds of those who drafted it. That sentence is little more than a formal preamble to what follows, namely to the statement of the wrongs which the colonists had suffered from their sovereign. No one now would accept that statement as a fair historical account of what had happened. Of the eighteen heads of indictment, each beginning " he has," there is hardly one which does not demand some modification or admit of some palliative. That part of the Declaration must be looked on as a criminal indictment drawn by an advocate, with just that lack of scruple which advocacy is generally held to justify. And though the assertion of human equality may have no exact or scientific basis, yet it is a description roughly correct of the theory which underlay the political life of the colonies, and which had been gradually separating them from the mother-country. In the Declaration of Independence that democratic system which had gradually, through force of circumstances, established itself in the colonies was blended with that element of sentiment, rhetorically expressed, which was needed if democracy was to be the quickening principle of a great popular movement. We may reverse this view, and say that the sentimental and rhetorical conception of democracy lost its dangers when it could embody itself in familiar and fully tested habits of action. When the teaching of Rousseau found its way to America, it was used, not in attempts to create a new heaven or a new earth, but to give the dignity of idealism and the attraction of romance to practical canons of conduct which had been slowly developing under the pressure of outward events. A little later we meet that principle in the Old World emancipated from these safeguards. Its expectations are no longer steadied by contact with historical facts, and it may at any moment become the stock-in-trade of charlatans or the ignis fatuus of dreamers. The ideal of liberty and equality recovers its value when it passes out of the area of abstract propositions and becomes a standard of perfection whereby to measure actual forms and institutions which have their origin not in theory but in history.