dependent.

Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, was selected to draw up the Declaration
which had been resolved upon. His pen had already served his country. In
1774 he had published _A Summary View of the Rights of British America_,
setting forth the dangers which menaced the country, and encouraging the
people in defence of their liberties. He had signalized himself in his
own colony by his opposition to slavery. "Wherever he was, there was
found a soul devoted to the cause of liberty, power to defend and
maintain it, and willingness to incur all its hazards."

On July 4th the Declaration was produced. It declared the abstract
principles on which their secession was justified; it then drew up an
indictment against the King, in eighteen heads, setting forth the
various ways in which he had proved himself "a tyrant unfit to be the
ruler of a free people." Finally it declared that the united colonies
were free and independent states; that the connection with Great Britain
was and ought to be totally dissolved, and that as free and independent
states, they had full power to "levy war, conclude peace, contract
alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which
independent states may of right do."

Seldom in human events do the facts of history carry their own
explanation so clearly with them. A people who had grown up gradually,
almost unconsciously, under democratic institutions, at last saw those
institutions subverted. To preserve the spirit of them, they changed
their form. We must not be misled into the error of underrating the
importance of the American struggle by any idea of the insignificance of
the issue at stake. We must not suppose that it was, as an earnest and
eloquent writer has called it, "a war for the vindication of the
principle of representative taxation." Its immediate origin, it is true,
involved no vital interest, such as often has been at stake when nations
have risen against their rulers. But "rebellions may fall out on small
occasions; they do not spring from small causes," was said by the first
and wisest of political philosophers. Taxation was, as Burke says, that
by which the colonists felt the pulse of liberty, "and as they found
that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound."

The whole key to the American Revolution lies in two facts; it was a
democratic and a conservative revolution. It was the work of the people,
and its end was to preserve, not to destroy or to cons