ne's words for the first time in a Memorial to the legislature,
which is given in an appendix to Otis's pamphlet.[104] On November 20,
1772, upon the motion of Samuel Adams a plan, which he had worked out,
of a declaration of rights of the colonists as men, Christians and
citizens was adopted by all the assembled citizens of Boston. It was
therein declared, with an appeal to Locke, that men enter into the state
by voluntary agreement, and they have the right beforehand in an
equitable compact to establish conditions and limitations for the state
and to see to it that these are carried out. Thereupon the colonists
demanded as men the right of liberty and of property, as Christians
freedom of religion, and as citizens the rights of Magna Charta and of
the Bill of Rights of 1689.[105]

Finally, on October 14, 1774, the Congress, representing twelve
colonies, assembled in Philadelphia adopted a declaration of rights,
according to which the inhabitants of the North American Colonies have
rights which belong to them by the unchangeable law of nature, by the
principles of the constitution of England and by their own
constitutions.[106]

From that to the declaration of rights by Virginia is apparently only a
step, and yet there is a world-wide difference between the two
documents. The declaration of Philadelphia is a protest, that of
Virginia a law. The appeal to England's law has disappeared. The state
of Virginia solemnly recognizes rights pertaining to the present and
future generations as the basis and foundation of government.[107]

In this and the following declarations of rights by the now sovereign
states of North America, by the side of the rights of liberty that had
been thus far asserted,--liberty of person, of property and of
conscience,--stand new ones, corresponding to the infringements most
recently suffered at England's hands of other lines of individual
liberty: the right of assembly, the freedom of the press and free
movement. But these rights of liberty were not the only ones therein
asserted, there were the right of petition, the demand for the
protection of law and the forms to be observed in insuring that, a
special demand for trial by an independent jury, and in the same way
with regard to other acts of the state; and the foundations of the
citizen's political rights were also declared. They thus contained
according to the intentions of their authors the distinctive features of
the entire public right