ginia and New England. Not only Hampden and Cromwell and the Ironsides, but Chatham, Holland, Burke, and Sir Philip Francis were compatriots of the colonials. The admirals of the fleet, Blake, Vernon, Anson, Hawke, were our admirals. It was for the nascent empire of our British and British-American forefathers that they won the supremacy of the sea. The victories of Marlborough, Clive's conquest of India, Wolfe's conquest of Canada-to which the young George Washington contributed the services of his still British sword—were glories not of a foreign race but of our race. For four generations we have been an independent people. But for six generations before that the intellectual and spiritual strivings of our British compatriots toward truth and freedom were those of the British in America. Harrington, Algernon Sidney, Locke, Hume, and Berkeley were ours. And in literature, Milton and Bunyan, Dryden and Pope, Swift, Addison, Gray and Goldsmith were our poets and essayists. Such was the birthright of our British forefathers in the American colonies. True it is that in legal procedure they preferred, during the years of primitive social conditions, the appeal to divine law and the law of reason or of human nature, as expounded by Hooker and his school, to any kind of law positive; and it is true that, within the field of positive law, they took more kindly to the civil which derives authority from enactment than to the common which derives from precedent. But when they reached "the stage of social organization which the common law expressed," they were only too glad to claim that birthright also, as conveyed by various early charters. And upon such right they based their appeal for civil liberty.

Not at all with 1776 did the English heritage cease to be the same for the sons of England at home and over the seas. In their resistance to taxation without representation, to coercion by force, to the Acts of Trade, the colonists in America were supported by Fox and the elder Pitt, by Shelburne, Camden, Burke, Rockingham, and all true patriots at home. Americans were asserting their rights as Englishmen under charter and common law. "Do not break their charter; do not take away rights granted them by the predecessors of the Crown!" cried members

of the English House of Commons. Pitt "pointed out distinctly that the Americans were upholding those eternal principles of political justice which should be to all Englishmen most dear, and that a victory over the colonies would be of ill omen for English liberty, whether in the Old World or the New." Speaking of the tea-duty, Lord North had asseverated, "I will never think of repealing it until I see America prostrate at my feet." To this Colonel Barre retorted, "Does any friend of his country really wish to see America thus humbled? In such a situation she would serve only as a monument of your arrogance and your folly. For my part, the America I wish to see is America increasing and prosperous, raising her head in graceful dignity, with freedom and firmness asserting her rights at your bar, vindicating her liberties, pleading her services, and conscious of her merit. This is the America that will have spirit to fight your battles, to sustain you when hard pushed by some prevailing foe. . . . Unless you repeal this law you run the risk of losing America." In the House of Lords, three devoted defenders of American liberty were the Dukes of Portland, Devonshire, and Northumberland. They were descended from Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, the founder, with Sir Edwin Sandys, of the charter liberties of Virginia. In that House, protesting against the "Intolerable Acts" of 1774, the Duke of Richmond thundered, "I wish from the bottom of my heart that the Americans may resist, and get the better of the forces sent against them." Not the historical precedent of England nor the political wisdom of her best "arrayed her in hostility to every principle of public justice which Englishmen had from time immemorial held sacred," but the perversity of an un-English prince and of his fatuous advisers. Bent upon thwarting the policy of reformers who would make the Commons more truly representative of the English people, upon destroying the system of cabinet government and resuscitating the theory of divine right, these unfortunates picked their quarrel with the American colonies. "For," as John Fiske shrewdly remarks, "if the American position, that there should be no taxation without representation, were once granted, then it would straightway become

necessary to admit the principles of Parliamentary reform," and to call the Liberals to power in England. A representation of the colonies in Westminster, though favored by some great Englishmen, might have been impracticable; but if George III had listened to the elder Pitt and his followers, he would have recognized the right of American freemen to levy their own taxes, and the Revolution would have been obviated. The would-be autocrat forced the issue in America and was defeated. If there had been no revolution in America there would have been a revolution in England, and the monarch would in all probability have been dethroned. The War of Independence reasserted for England as well as for America the political rights for which Englishmen, from the time of King John to that of James I, from the time of Hooker, Shakspere, Sandys, Bradford, Winthrop, Sir Thomas Dale, and Sir Francis Wyatt, to that of Cromwell, had contended. It confirmed the victories of the Great Rebellion and of the Revolution of 1688. The younger Pitt denounced the war against the American colonies as "most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical." And when Charles Fox heard that Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, he leaped from his chair and clapped his hands. The victory at Yorktown dissipated once for all the fatal delusion of divine prerogative. Those who conceived and carried through the American Revolution were Anglo-Saxons: Otis, Samuel and John Adams, Hancock, Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Franklin, Jefferson, Washington. The greatest of Americans was the greatest Englishman of his age: Washington was but asserting against a despotic sovereign of German blood and broken English speech the prerogative of the Anglo-Saxon breed, the faith of his liberal brothers in England.

Political history has, indeed, worn its independent channel; but spirit and speech, letters, order of freedom and control in the America of today are of the ancient blood and custom.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN CRITICISM1

MOSES COIT TYLER

[Moses Coit Tyler (1835-1900) was a distinguished American educator and scholar in literature and history. After graduating from Yale in 1877, he became a Congregational minister, but his health failing from overstudy, he spent four years in England recuperating. On his return to America, he accepted, in 1867, the chair of English literature at the University of Michigan. In 1881 he was called to the professorship of American history at Cornell, a position which he held until his death. His literary histories dealing with the Colonial and the Revolutionary periods of American literature have secured for him a wide reputation for scholarship. In a time when it has become fashionable to sneer at certain features of the Declaration of Independence, it is well for every American to follow Tyler's admirable discussion of the criticisms to which this great document has been subjected. As limitations of space in this volume have made it necessary to abridge Tyler's article, the student should if possible secure it in its entirety and carefully read it.]

It can hardly be doubted that some hindrance to a right estimate of the Declaration of Independence is occasioned by either of two opposite conditions of mind, both of which are often to be met with among us: on the one hand, a condition of hereditary, uncritical awe and worship of the American Revolution, and of that state paper as its absolutely perfect and glorious expression; on the other hand, a later condition of cultivated distrust of the Declaration, as a piece of writing lifted up into inordinate renown by the passionate and heroic circumstances of its origin, and ever since then extolled beyond reason by the blind energy of patriotic enthusiasm. Turning from the former state of mind, which obviously calls for no further comment, we may note, as a partial illustration of the latter, that American confidence in the supreme intellectual merit of this all-famous document received a serious wound some forty years ago from the hand of Rufus Choate, when, with a courage greater than would now be required for such an act, he characterized it as made up of "glittering and sounding generalities of natural 1From North American Review, vol. clxiii, p. 1 (July, 1896).

right." What the great advocate then so unhesitatingly suggested, many a thoughtful American since then has at least suspected that our great proclamation, as a piece of political literature, cannot stand the test of modern analysis; that it belongs to the immense class of over-praised productions; that it is, in fact, a stately patchwork of sweeping propositions of somewhat doubtful validity; that it has long imposed upon mankind by the well-known effectiveness of verbal glitter and sound; that, at the best, it is an example of florid political declamation belonging to the sophomoric period of our national life, a period which, as we flatter ourselves, we have now outgrown.

Nevertheless, it is to be noted that whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the world, has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its first appearance, or since then; a fact which seems to tell in favor of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again and again, either in anger, or in contempt, by friends as well as by enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, it has been censured for its form, for its misstatements of fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally, for its grandiose and vaporing style.

Perhaps, however, the most frequent form of disparagement to which Jefferson's great state paper has been subjected among us is that which would minimize his merit in composing it, by denying to it the merit of originality.

By no one, however, has the charge of a lack of originality been pressed with so much decisiveness as by John Adams, who took evident pleasure in speaking of it as a document in which were merely "recapitulated" previous and well-known statements of American rights and wrongs, and who, as late as in the year 1822, deliberately wrote:

"There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of