It seems simple enough to-day, but it was something else in that day. The men who signed the Declaration knew not but they were signing warrants for their own ignominious execution on the gibbet. The bloody victims of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were still a warning to rebels; and the gory holocaust of Culloden was fresh in the memory. But it was not only the personal risk; it was risking the homes, the commerce, the lives, the property, the honor, the future destiny of three million innocent people,—men, women, and children. It was defying on behalf of a straggling chain of colonies clinging to the sea-board, the most imperial power of the world. It was, more than all, like Columbus sailing into awful uncertainty of untried space, casting off from an established and familiar form of government and politics, drifting away to unknown methods, and upon the dangerous and yawning chaos of democratic institutions, flying from ills they had to those they knew not of, and perhaps laying the way for a miserable and bloody catastrophe in anarchy and riot. There are times when ordinary men are borne by the tide of an occasion to crests of grandeur in conduct and action. Such a time, such an occasion, was that of the Declaration. While the signers were picked men, none the less true is it that their extraordinary fame is due not more to their merits than to the crisis at which they were at the helm and to the great popular instinct which they obeyed and expressed. And why do we commemorate with such veneration and display this special epoch and event in our history? Why do we repeat the words our fathers spoke or wrote? Why cherish their names, when our civilization is better than theirs and when we have reached in science, art, education, religion, politics, in every phase of human development, even in morals, a higher level? It is because we recognize that in their beginnings the eternal elements of truth and right and justice were conspicuous. To those eternal verities we pay our tribute, and not to their surroundings, except so far as we let the form stand for the spirit, the man for the idea, the event for the purpose. And it is also because we can do no better work than to perpetuate virtue in the citizen by keeping always fresh in the popular mind the great heroic deeds and times of our history. The valuable thing in the past is not the man or the events,—which are both always ordinary and which under the enchantment of distance and the pride of descent, we love to surround with exaggerated glory,—it is rather in the sentiment for which the man and the event stand. The ideal is alone substantial and alone survives. THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION BY GEORGE LIPPARD It is a cloudless summer day; a clear blue sky arches and expands above a quaint edifice rising among the giant trees in the center of a wide city. That edifice is built of plain red brick, with heavy window frames, and a massive hall door.