As early as 1754 these Americans began to feel the first real burden of their legal status as “subjects.” Their community wealth was beginning to attract the attention of the world. As a result, the legal Government awoke to the fact of their existence and of its own omnipotent ability to levy upon that wealth. The Americans, for more than a century educated in actual self-government, quickly showed the result of that education to the accurate knowledge that no government can have any just power except by the consent or grant of those to be governed by the exercise of such power. As far back as 1754, deputies of the various American colonies, where human beings had educated themselves to be free men, assembled at Albany in an endeavor to propose some compromise by which the American people would be enabled to preserve their human freedom against unjust interference by the Westminster Legislature. We are all familiar with the failure of that endeavor. We are all familiar with the successive steps of the continuing struggle between “subjects,” educated to be “citizens,” and an omnipotent government, unshaken in its purpose to make their actual status the same as their legal one. When the year 1776 dawned, these Americans were still “subjects” under the law of the British Empire. They were, however, “subjects” in open rebellion against their government, justifying their rebellion on the basic American legal principle that every just power, even of a lawful government, must be derived from the consent or grant of the human beings themselves who are to be governed. On the memorable day in July of that year, despairing of any success in getting the British Government to recognize that basic principle, and asserting, for the first time in history, that they themselves were collectively the possessors of the supreme human will in and for America, they enacted the immortal Statute which we know as the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence, _which was the first political act of the American people in their independent sovereign capacity_, lays the foundation of our national existence upon this broad proposition: “That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” (Justice Bradley’s opinion in Slaughter House Cases, 16 _Wall._ 36, at page 115.)