old idea.
The nobles lived upon the labor of the people; the people had no rights;
the nobles stole what they had and divided with the kings, and the kings
pretended to divide what they stole with God Almighty. The source, then,
of political power was from above. The people were responsible to the
nobles, the nobles to the king, and the people had no political rights
whatever, no more than the wild beasts of the forest. The kings were
responsible to God; not to the people. The kings were responsible to the
clouds; not to the toiling millions they robbed and plundered.

And our forefathers, in this declaration of independence, reversed this
thing, and said: No; the people, they are the source of political power,
and their rulers, these presidents, these kings, are but the agents and
servants of the great, sublime people. For the first time, really, in
the history of the world, the king was made to get off the throne
and the people were royally seated thereon. The people became the
sovereigns, and the old sovereigns became the servants and the agents
of the people. It is hard for you and me now to imagine even the immense
results of that change. It is hard for you and for me, at this day, to
understand how thoroughly it had been ingrained in the brain of almost
every man, that the king had some wonderful right over him; that in
some strange way the king owned him; that in some miraculous manner he
belonged, body and soul, to somebody who rode on a horse--to somebody
with epaulettes on his shoulders and a tinsel crown upon his brainless
head.

Our forefathers had been educated in that idea, and when they first
landed on American shores they believed it. They thought they belonged
to somebody, and that they must be loyal to some thief, who could trace
his pedigree back to antiquity's most successful robber.

It took a long time for them to get that idea out of their heads and
hearts. They were three thousand miles away from the despotisms of
the old world, and every wave of the sea was an assistant to them. The
distance helped to disenchant their minds of that infamous belief, and
every mile between them and the pomp and glory of monarchy helped to put
republican ideas and thoughts into their minds. Besides that, when
they came to this country, when the savage was in the forest and three
thousand miles of waves on the other side, menaced by barbarians on
the one side and famine on the other, they learned that a man who h