The great Civil war was but the test whether that nation could endure; so said Lincoln, whom we are learning to know as our greatest statesman. All our subsequent history is but the voyage of the ship of state by the chart then drafted. Toward the Declaration converge all previous lines of historical development; from the Declaration diverge all the lines along which patriotic statesmanship must hereafter guide the national future. Deviations from these converging and diverging paths have been but blind trails to be painfully retraced. Here, then, let us repeat, is the focus of our national life. In what act, in what incident shall we find this moment of time expressed most dramatically? The streets of Philadelphia were thronged with citizens awaiting news of the action of Congress. Within the old State House were the councilors of the colonies—the group of contemporaries whom Gladstone declared unequaled in the history of the world. One by one the names of the representatives were signed to that document which was to commit them to death as rebels or to immortality as patriots. As the last name was affixed, a little boy ran from the doorway out into the street, and, tossing his arms above his head, gave forth the tidings of a nation’s birth in the words: “Ring! _Ring!_ RING!” and then the Liberty Bell echoed the gospel, as foreordained in its inscription: “Proclaim liberty to the land: to all the inhabitants thereof.” That is the most dramatic incident in American history. Whether we view its inception or its outcome, it stands unrivaled. We shall forever “celebrate it with thanksgiving” so long as the nation endures. This incident responds to every test. It is the action of a single person actuated by intense emotion; he, a child, was a type of the fact he expressed; through his puny action began the independent life of a nation to whose future none dares prescribe limits. Discovery and colonization were inevitable, and are common to all lands. Civil wars are expressions rather than causes of great crises. Civil and commercial progress are inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence was an act of conscious choice. No other incident in our history was so momentous, none so dramatic and comprehensive of past and future. Columbus was an unconscious instrument in opening a new world; the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English explorers were all working toward a consummation none foresaw; the founders of colonies had their ideals, but all have been swallowed up in our national development. The Revolution alone looked both backward and forward, and the fathers of the republic gave us the law of our national being. The birth-cry of the nation came from the lips of the child who cried aloud in the streets: “Ring! _Ring!_ RING!” THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN CRITICISM[8] BY MOSES COIT TYLER (Professor of History in Cornell University.) I