nations." Great Britain was thus declared to be the superior of America, with power according to the law of nature and of nations, to control, by its will, the will and action of America as a "dependent" country, and of each and all of its inhabitants as "dependent" individuals. We discover, then, from an examination of the circumstances surrounding the Declaration of Independence, a most interesting situation. A young nation, separated by a wide ocean from Europe, settled by men who were full of the spirit of the Reformation, deeply convinced, after a national life of one hundred and fifty years, that these principles were of universal application, was suddenly met by a denial of these principles from the European State with which they were most intimately related. This denial was accompanied by acts of that State which amounted to a prohibition of the application of these principles in American political life. This European State was indeed the mother-country of America, and the Americans were bound to their English brethren by every tie of interest and affection. The Americans were only radical Englishmen, who gloried in the fact that England of all the countries of Europe had gone farthest in accepting the principles of the Reformation, and who had emigrated reluctantly from England, because they were out of harmony with the tendency of English political life to compromise between the principles of Mediaevalism and the principles of the Reformation. The Declaratory Act of 1766 brought clearly into comparison the political system of America, as opposed to the political system of Europe. It was inevitable from that moment that the American System, based on the principles of the Reformation in their broadest sense and their most universal application and briefly summed up in the proposition that "all men are created equal," must conquer, or be conquered by, the European System, based either on the principles of Mediaevalism, summed up in the proposition that "all men are created unequal," or on a compromise between the principles of Mediaevalism and the Reformation, summed up in the proposition that "some men are created equal, and some unequal." In the light of this situation, let us examine the words of the Declaration. The philosophical statements in which we are interested, read: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, 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 entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation:--