Page:Criticism on the Declaration of independence, as a literary document (IA criticismondecla00seld).pdf/28

 rights to life and liberty therefore, are but a rhetorical cheat—a fiction of the sophist's brain. The word "rights" in its juxtaposition to life and liberty, communicating no appreciable idea; is but darkening counsel by words without knowledge. I cannot but reiterate, what I have I believe expressed before, that the friends of emancipation de fritter away their logic, by settings forth of these crude incomprehensible fictions. They communicate no idea, and possess no force but to puzzle. The right to liberty must be proved by possession, or by human endowments; otherwise it becomes as valueless as an abstract right to a tin whistle, which the owner is not permitted to blow; no nor to look at; and which upon further search is after all not to be found any where. The consolations such a right as this must give, are all the consolation which the poor slave has. To console him with a statement of them, is but n mockery and an aggravation.

The third item with which we are endowed, and which is affirmed to possess the same fixed attributes as the others, is the "right to the pursuit of happiness!!" The idea, if there was one attached to this expression, is too remote and vague for criticism. The attempt to weigh an abstraction in scales, or moonshine in a balance, would require the same manipulations as an attempt to calculate the value of an idea which its author could not express. The most favorable construction I can put upon it is, that no idea was meant to be communicated. The passage was particularly designed for southern cars; therefore sound, not sense, was required. It was more euphonious to terminate the clause with these sounds, than to stop where the idea stopped; hence they were added.

A sarcastic Frenchman once said, "the chief use of language is to conceal ideas." That was not the chief use of it in the case before us; for it does not appear there was any idea to conceal. Pursuit of happiness!! Right to the pursuit of happiness!!! The same logic, which I am sure made it satisfactory to the reader, that the right to life must cöexist with the possession—that they are one and inseparable—is applicable in the present case. To be endowed with an abstract right to the pursuit of happiness, and yet endowed with no ability to pursue, is in all respects as barren a privilege as the right to life when one is not.