The hour of independence was at last come. Already as a termination of their proclamations, instead of "God save the King!" the Virginians had adopted this proudly significant phrase, "God save the liberties of America!" Congress resolved to give its true name to the war against the metropolis, sustained for three years by the colonies. After a discussion which lasted for three days, the proposition drawn up by Jefferson for the Declaration of Independence was adopted with unanimity--"unanimity unfortunately slightly factitious." [Footnote 4] [Footnote 4: Cornelis de Witt, History of Washington.] To the solemn preamble affirming the eternal rights of peoples to liberty as well as justice, followed an enumeration of the grievances which had forever alienated from the sovereign of Great Britain the obedience of his American subjects. "We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America assembled in general congress, invoking the Supreme Judge to witness the rectitude of our intentions, do solemnly publish and declare in the name of the good people of these colonies that the united colonies are and have a right to be free and independent states, that they are disburdened of all allegiance to the crown of Great Britain, and that every political bond between them and Great Britain is and ought to be entirely dissolved. ... Full of a firm confidence in the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually devote to the maintenance of this Declaration our lives, our fortunes, and our most sacred possession, our honor." {283} In America the solemn Declaration of Independence did not cause a lively emotion; the lot had been cast for the Americans since the day when they had taken up arms. At the opening of Parliament on the 31st of October, King George III., while deploring the decisive act by which the rebels had broken all the bonds which attached them to the mother-country, and rejected attempts at conciliation, ended his appeal to the fidelity of the nation with these words: "A single and great advantage will flow from the frank declaration of their intentions by the rebels; we shall be henceforth united at home, and all will understand the justice and necessity of our measure. I have not, and I cannot have, in this cruel struggle, any other desire than the true interest of all my subjects. Never has a people enjoyed a good fortune more complete or a government more lenient than have the revolted provinces. Their progress in all the arts of which they are proud, give them sufficient proof of it; their number, their wealth, their strength on land and sea, which they deem sufficient to resist all the power of the mother-country, are the unexceptionable proof of it. I have no other object than to deal them the benefits of the law in the liberty which all English subjects equally enjoy, and which they have fatally exchanged for the calamities of war and the arbitrary tyranny of their chiefs." {284}