Our union is now complete. You have in the first armies sufficient to repel the whole force of your enemies. The hearts of your soldiers beat high with the spirit of freedom. Go on, then, in your generous enterprise, with gratitude to heaven for past success, and confidence of it in the future! For my own part, I ask no greater blessing than to share with you the common danger and the common glory. If I have a wish dearer to my soul than that my ashes may be mingled with those of a Warren and a Montgomery, it is, THAT THESE AMERICAN STATES MAY NEVER CEASE TO BE FREE AND INDEPENDENT! THE DIGNITY OF OUR NATION’S FOUNDERS BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS The Declaration of Independence was, when it occurred, a capital transaction in human affairs; as such it has kept its place in history; as such it will maintain itself while human interest in human institutions shall endure. The scene and the actors, for their profound impression on the world, at the time and ever since, have owed nothing to dramatic effects, nothing to epical exaggerations. To the eye there was nothing wonderful or vast or splendid or pathetic in the movement or the display. Imagination or art can give no sensible grace or decoration to the persons, the place, or the performance which made up the business of that day. The worth and force that belong to the agents and the action rest wholly on the wisdom, the courage and the faith that formed and executed the great design, and the potency and permanence of its operation upon the affairs of the world which followed as foreseen and legitimate consequences. The dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open and serene performance by these men, in the clear light of day and by a concurrent purpose, of a civic duty which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all the people from whom they held this disputed discretion but which to their sober judgments promised benefits to that people and to their posterity, exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness. The question of their conduct is to be measured by the actual weight and pressure of the manifold considerations which surrounded the subject before them and by the abundant evidence that they comprehended their vastness and variety. By a voluntary and responsible choice they willed to do what was done and what without their will would not have been done.