Rights but the problem is one far too subtle and intricate for
regulation by statute, as the Supreme Court has discovered. Status
based upon color still exists both North and South though without
legal sanction.[139]

The noble conceptions of freedom and equality which were embodied in
the bills of rights and the Declaration of Independence were destined
in time to triumph over slavery, though not without bloodshed. It is
interesting to trace their influence on the status of the slave. The
doctrine of human rights found in the Declaration of Independence and
in the bills of rights of the State constitutions, despite its
metaphysical cast, is not derived from the political philosophy of the
French; the key of the demolished Bastile sent by Lafayette to
Washington by the hand of Thomas Paine symbolized rather the debt owed
to America by France.[140] The Declaration itself perhaps shows
closer affiliations with John Locke's _Treatise on Civil Government_,
which may be taken as a statement of the principles contended for in
the Puritan Revolution of 1688. But even Locke's ideas of civil and
religious liberty were not original with him. They were in reality the
result of applying to the sphere of politics the logical implications
of doctrines preached by the Protestant reformers of a century or two
earlier in their revolt against the authority of tradition. To be sure
the masses of men were ignorant of the theological distinctions drawn
by Luther and Knox between the democracy of sin under the first Adam
and the democracy of grace under the second Adam or Christ. The
levelling effect of these ideas, however, was unmistakably felt as in
the doggerel of John Ball, the mad Wycliffite priest of Kent,

"When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?"

In the next century under the pressure of their struggle against
injustice masquerading behind charters and parliaments, the Puritans
under the leadership of John Locke made their appeal to natural rights
just as the reformers before them had made their appeal to the higher
rights and duties that hold in a spiritual kingdom of grace. The
appeal, originally religious in origin, now appears stripped of its
theological setting and hence with a certain "metaphysical nakedness"
which only the enthusiasm and sense of need arising from the
necessities of their situation prevented its champions from
perceiving. Locke and Blackstone, while insisting upon the absolute
an