may be stated in the form
which Jefferson uses--that all men are equal in their "inalienable
rights." But it must be accepted as a first principle or not at all. The
nearest approach to a method of proving it is to take the alternative
proposition and deduce its logical conclusion. Would those who would
maintain that the "wisest and best" have rights superior to those of
their neighbours, welcome a law which would enable any person
demonstrably wiser or more virtuous than themselves to put them to
death? I think that most of them have enough modesty (and humour) to
shrink, as Huxley did, from such a proposition. But the alternative is
the acceptance of Jefferson's doctrine that the fundamental rights of
men are independent of adventitious differences, whether material or
moral, and depend simply upon their manhood.

The other proposition, the contractual basis of human society and its
logical consequences, the supremacy of the general will, can be argued
in the same fashion. It is best defended by asking, like the Jesuit
Suarez, the simple question: "If sovereignty is not in the People, where
is it?" It is useless to answer that it is in the "wisest and best." Who
are the wisest and best? For practical purposes the phrases must mean
either those whom their neighbours think wisest and best--in which case
the ultimate test of democracy is conceded--or those who think
themselves wisest and best: which latter is what in the mouths of such
advocates it usually does mean. Thus those to whom the Divine Right of
the conceited makes no appeal are forced back on the Jeffersonian
formula. Let it be noted that that formula does not mean that the people
are always right or that a people cannot collectively do deliberate
injustice or commit sins--indeed, inferentially it implies that
possibility--but it means that there is on earth no temporal authority
superior to the general will of a community.

It is, however, no part of the function of this book to argue upon the
propositions contained in the Declaration of Independence. It is merely
necessary to chronicle the historical fact that Jefferson, as mouthpiece
of the Continental Congress, put forward these propositions as
self-evident, and that all America, looking at them, accepted them as
such. On that acceptance, the intensity and ardent conviction of which
showed itself, as will presently be seen, in a hundred ways, the
American Commonwealth is built. In the modern haze of doub