deed a mere amateur in the use of words. Lincoln
would not have scattered in his utterances overwrought phrases about
"death, desolation and tyranny" or talked about pledging "our lives, our
fortunes and our sacred honour." He indulged in no "Flights of Oratory."
The passion in the Declaration is concentrated against the King. We do
not know what were the emotions of George when he read it. We know that
many Englishmen thought that it spoke truth. Exaggerations there are
which make the Declaration less than a completely candid document. The
King is accused of abolishing English laws in Canada with the intention
of "introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies." What had
been done in Canada was to let the conquered French retain their own
laws--which was not tyranny but magnanimity. Another clause of the
Declaration, as Jefferson first wrote it, made George responsible for
the slave trade in America with all its horrors and crimes. We may doubt
whether that not too enlightened monarch had even more than vaguely
heard of the slave trade. This phase of the attack upon him was too much
for the slave owners of the South and the slave traders of New England,
and the clause was struck out.

Nearly fourscore and ten years later, Abraham Lincoln, at a supreme
crisis in the nation's life, told in Independence Hall, Philadelphia,
what the Declaration of Independence meant to him. "I have never,"
he said, "had a feeling politically which did not spring from the
sentiments in the Declaration of Independence"; and then he spoke of
the sacrifices which the founders of the Republic had made for these
principles. He asked, too, what was the idea which had held together the
nation thus founded. It was not the breaking away from Great Britain. It
was the assertion of human right. We should speak in terms of reverence
of a document which became a classic utterance of political right and
which inspired Lincoln in his fight to end slavery and to make "Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness" realities for all men. In England the
colonists were often taunted with being "rebels." The answer was not
wanting that ancestors of those who now cried "rebel" had themselves
been rebels a hundred years earlier when their own liberty was at stake.

There were in Congress men who ventured to say that the Declaration
was a libel on the government of England; men like John Dickinson of
Pennsylvania and John Jay of New York, who feared that the radic