Only the people, Burlamaqui explained, have inherent inalienable rights; and they alone can confer the privilege of commanding. It had been supposed that the sovereign alone had rights, and the people only privileges. But here were Burlamaqui, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Locke, and fully half the American colonists, undertaking to reverse this order and announcing that the people alone had rights, and the sovereign merely privileges. These principles the Americans afterwards translated in their documents by the phrase, “a just government exists only by consent of the governed.” All men being born politically equal, the colonies, as Dickinson and Hamilton explained, are equally with Great Britain entitled to happiness, equally entitled to govern themselves, equally entitled to freedom and independence. It is curious to see the cautious way in which some of the colonists applied these doctrines by mixing them up with loyalty arguments. This is very noticeable in the pamphlets written by Alexander Hamilton. He gives the stock arguments for redress of grievances, freedom from internal taxation, government by the king alone, and will not admit that he is anything but a loyal subject. At the same time there runs through all he says an undercurrent of strong rebellion which leads to his ultimate object. “The power,” he says, “which one society bestows upon any man or body of men can never extend beyond its own limits.” This he lays down as a universal truth, independently of charters and the wonderful British Constitution. It applied to the whole world. Parliament was elected by the people of England, therefore it had no authority outside of the British isle. That British isle and America were separate societies. “Nature,” said Hamilton, “has distributed an equality of rights to every man.” How then, he asked, can the English people have any rights over life, liberty, or property in America? They can have authority only among themselves in England. We are separated from Great Britain, Hamilton argued, not only by the ocean, by geography, but because we have no part or share in governing her. Therefore, as we have no share in governing her, she, by the law of nature, can have no share in governing us; she is a separate society. The British, he said, were attempting to involve in the idea of a colony the idea of political slavery, and against that a man must fight with his life. To be controlled by the superior wisdom of another nation was ridiculous, unworthy of the consideration of manhood; and at this point he used that sentence which has so often been quoted—“Deplorable is the condition of that people who have nothing else than the wisdom and justice of another to depend upon.” Charters and documents, he declared, must yield to natural laws and our rights as men.