Thus estimated, the illustrious act covers all who participated in it with its own renown and makes them forever conspicuous among men, as it is forever famous among events. And thus the signers of our Declaration of Independence “wrote their names where all nations should behold them and all time should not efface them.” It was “in the course of human events” intrusted to them to determine whether the fullness of time had come when a nation should be born in a day. They declared the independence of a new nation in the sense in which men declare emancipation or declare war,—the declaration created what was declared. Famous always among men are the founders of states and fortunate above all others in such fame are these, our fathers, whose combined wisdom and courage began the great structure of our national existence and laid sure the foundations of liberty and justice on which it rests. Fortunate first in the clearness of their title and in the world’s acceptance of their rightful claim. Fortunate next in the enduring magnitude of the State they founded and the beneficence of its protection of the vast interests of human life and happiness which have here had their home. Fortunate again in the admiring imitations of their work which the institutions of the most powerful and most advanced nations more and more exhibit. Fortunate last of all in the full demonstration of our later time that their work is adequate to withstand the most disastrous storms of human fortunes and survive unwrecked, unshaken and unharmed. THE CHARACTER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE BY GEORGE BANCROFT This immortal State paper, which for its composer was the aurora of enduring fame, was “the genuine effusion of the soul of the country at that time,” the revelation of its mind, when, in its youth, its enthusiasm, its sublime confronting of danger, it rose to the highest creative powers of which man is capable. The bill of rights which it promulgates is of rights that are older than human institutions, and spring from the eternal justice that is anterior to the State. Two political theories divided the world: one founded the Commonwealth on the reason of State, the policy of expediency; the other on the immutable principles of morals. The new Republic, as it took its place among the powers of the world, proclaimed its faith in the truth and reality and unchangeableness of freedom, virtue and right.