law was indeed firmly rooted
in England before Jefferson talked of equality, but it amazed the rest of
Europe when the House of Lords hanged a peer for the murder of his
servant. There are indefinitely many further ways in which men who are
utterly unequal had best be treated as creatures equally entitled to the
consideration of government and of their neighbours. It is safer to
carry this principle too far than not to carry it far enough. If
Jefferson had expressed this and his cognate principle of liberty with
scientific precision, or with the full personal sincerity with which a
greater man like Lincoln expressed it, he would have said little from
which any Englishman to-day would dissent. None the less he would have
enunciated a doctrine which most Governments then existing set at naught
or proscribed, and for which Hamilton and the prosperous champions of
independence who supported him had no use.

The Declaration of Independence was not a very candid State paper, and
the popularity Jefferson afterwards created for its sentiments was not
wholly free from humbug. Many men were more ready to think themselves
the equals of Washington or Hamilton in the respects in which they were
not so, than to think a negro their own equal in the respects in which he
was. The boundless space and untrammelled conditions of the new world
made liberty and equality in some directions highly attainable ideals, so
much so that they seemed to demand little effort or discipline. The
patriotic orators under whom Lincoln sat in his youth would ascribe to
the political wisdom of their great democracy what was really the result
of geography. They would regard the extent of forest and prairie as
creditable to themselves, just as some few Englishmen have regarded our
location upon an island.

This does not, however, do away with the value of that tradition of the
new world which in its purest and sincerest form became part and parcel
of Lincoln's mind. Jefferson was a great American patriot. In his case
insistence on the rights of the several States sprang from no
half-hearted desire for a great American nation; he regarded these
provincial organisations as machinery by which government and the people
could be brought nearer together; and he contributed that which was most
needed for the evolution of a vigorous national life. He imparted to the
very recent historical origin of his country, and his followers imparted
to its material c