rise in arms among us and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of others."

It is of the utmost importance to consider the above excerpt from the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. This most remarkable instrument contains more than twenty-eight specifications to prove that "The King of Great Britain" and his cabinet evinced a design to reduce the colonies under absolute despotism and having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the States. The Declaration was a manifesto of the abuses suffered and threatened against the natural and absolute rights of mankind as such, and a recital of the usurpations of the civil and political rights secured to the Americans under their colonial systems. Some of the rights embraced by the Declaration were natural or absolute, and some were civil or political. When its author wrote that "All men were created equal" an absolute or natural condition must have been intended, as the limit of this "equal" or "equality." It is a self-evident truth that all men by their Creator were endowed with certain unalienable rights, to wit: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that any government which endangers or destroys such rights would be an "absolute tyranny," and those who suffer may throw off such government and provide new safeguards for their future security, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled them. Creation is an attribute of the Almighty, and Jefferson, in asserting that all men were created. equal knew the racial and ethnological differences between men, as well as their moral, social and intellectual differences and inequalities. He also knew that in the formation of any new government, political rights would naturally be classified, excluding from voting males under twenty-one years of age, women and children and unnaturalized aliens; but that these disabilities or inequalities of political rights would not impair the endow

ment of any person of any age, sex, race, color or condition, living under, or being subject to such government, of those certain unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is true, however, that when the author of the Declaration of Independence postulated that all men are created equal and were endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, he denounced all forms of chattel slavery existing in the United States or elsewhere on the face of the globe. In writing of that portion of the Declaration proscriptive of slavery, as he himself inserted it, he says: "The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it. Our Northern brethren also, I believe, feel a little tender under those censures for though their people had very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."

Jefferson was noted for his scholarship, and he knew the meaning of statutory, conventional and political rights and duties by which are defined the status of citizenship and the regulations of suffrage, in order to avoid the confusion and anarchy that might result from universal suffrage; and that it was an inherent power in all governments to arrange their own elective franchise and to define with precision the tenures and qualifications of office, but that such exercise of civil, political or governmental functions would not restrict those pre-existing natural rights pertaining equally to all members of the human family. Jefferson's severe arraignment of the so-called Christian King of Great Britain in not suppressing the "execrable traffic," and his comments on the rejection of so much of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, show that all he wrote in the context concerning "certain unalienable rights" were incompatible with the moral toleration and continued legality of African slavery in America.

Of these absolute rights, John Randolph Tucker, in his "Constitution of the United States" says: "Herein we find the true

equality between men. It is the sole exclusive and personal right of each man to the endowments each receives from his Maker. Inter homines, each man's title to these is absolute."

In an address on Decoration Day in New York some years since, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll stated, "Let us be truthful; all our fathers were not true to themselves. They qualified the Declaration. They interpolated the word 'white,' and they obliterated the word 'all.""

Mr. John J. Vertrees, in the Olympian Magazine, June, 1903, in a very excellent article on the "Negro Problem," refers with a large degree of approval, to the above statement of Colonel Ingersoll. Mr. Hooper Alexander, in his answer to Dr. Hillis in the New York Sun, written from a Southern standpoint, also intimates that the Declaration of Independence was intended for the white man only. We think that all of these inferences are entirely erroneous. Jefferson's recital of universal rights did include an indictment of slavery, and that it was restrictive of and repugnant to the aims and purposes of civilized government and of Christian enlightenment. The Declaration has been too often confused with the Constitution; one was a declaration of rights, and an enumeration of protests; the other was an organic enactment of positive law. The Dred Scott decision determined that the word "white" was interpolated into the Constitution. There was no such qualification or limitation as Jefferson drafted it in the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution itself was adverse to slavery or the perpetuation of it, as shown by Section 9, which provided that the migration or importation of such persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit shall not be prohibited by Congress prior to 1808. This extension for the importation of slaves for a short term of years indicated the sense and sentiment of the makers of the Constitution, and that after a given period their importation should be suppressed. Madison was successful in keeping the world "slavery" from being mentioned anywhere in the Constitution, and John Randolph, of Virginia, said that "the American Eagle" was hatched with poison ("slavery") under its wing. The long declared judi

cial sanction that manumission was instantaneous with the first step of a slave upon English soil, seems no bar at this very time, to the British government deciding in the Transvaal to amend the municipal ordinance so as to exclude aliens, as well as colored men, thus restricting the franchise to white British subjects.

Jefferson instituted legislation in favor of public schools in Virginia; he was the founder of the University of Virginia; he believed that the strength and the perpetuity of Republican institutions depended upon the enlightenment and education of its electors and shared with the French the belief that an ignorant or corrupt ballot would be the shroud of liberty. President Lincoln wrote to the provisional governor, Hahn, of Louisiana, March 13th, 1864, and President Johnson wrote to the provisional governor, Sharkey, of Mississippi, August 15th, 1865, deprecating the purposes of a certain radical element in the North to confer the elective franchise on the illiterate freedmen in the South. The Supreme Court of the United States in the Mississippi and Alabama cases has decided that it is the political right and power of a sovereign State to abride suffrage by a prerequisite educational qualification or condition, and that such provisions in the Constitution of any Southern State did not violate the Fifteenth Amendment, whereby a State was forbidden to deny or abridge the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. The Fifteenth Amendment proposed to the legislatures of the several States by the Fortieth Congress, 1867, had been rejected by large majorities of the popular votes in many States, whose legislatures afterwards adopted it under the plea of "party necessity." The great State of New York is on record to-day as having opposed negro enfranchisement. The Constitution itself implied the doom of slavery by limiting the term of years of bringing them into this country in captivity. Although Jefferson desired emancipation and foresaw the end. of slavery in the United States, he said that the two races could not live together on terms of social or political equality.

On the 16th of December, 1793, Jefferson, the Secretary of State, made his celebrated report on the relations existing with

foreign nations, and "this," says Alexander H. Stephens, "is one of the ablest State papers penned by him or any other man in this country or any other country." Mr. Stephens also speaks of the novel theory indicated by Jefferson of the divisions of the delegated powers into legislative, executive and judicial departments, with an organization and machinery in the conventional government formed for the exercise of all its delegated and limited power similar to those of the States. Both Lord Brougham and M. de Tocqueville, in his Political Philosophy, allude to this particular specific difference between the Federal republic of the United States and all other of similar general type. The knowledge and observance of and veneration for the Jeffersonian principle, will perpetuate the imperishability of the nation if in inviolable union with the rights of our indestructible States. Hamilton submitted to the first session of Congress, after the Constitution, a bill for the ratio representation under it to the entire population of all the States as one mass, instead of applying it to each State separately which latter, as Jefferson insisted in a written opinion in the cabinet, was the only correct Federal principle. Washington vetoed Hamilton's plan, Jefferson's was adopted, which has been adhered to in principle in every appointment bill which has been passed since. Hamilton was responsible for the Alien and Sedition Acts passed under the administration of John Adams. Jefferson said they would lead inevitably to a centralized empire. Every plan submitted by Hamilton to the Constitutional Convention was rejected; he said he had no faith in the Constitution, although he did not dare to talk it all the way from Dan to Beersheba. Hamilton said the people were a great "Beast," a paraphrase more expressive of contempt of "the people" than that of Louis the Magnificent, who stigmatized them as "that animal." Jefferson said ours was a government of the people, and they alone were sovereign. Hamilton advocated the adoption of the Constitution, but he believed it would be a failure.

Martin Van Buren, Vice-President and President of the United States, who lived in the same State and day with Hamilton, says: