under its flag to be thrown by lawless hands into the sea.” Even “the preposterous violence and the manifest insincerity of the suppressed clause” against slavery and the slave-trade “are enough to create suspicion as to the spirit in which the whole document was framed.” III Finally, as has been already intimated, not even among Americans themselves has the Declaration of Independence been permitted to pass on into the enjoyment of its superb renown, without much critical disparagement at the hands of statesmen and historians. No doubt Calhoun had its preamble in mind when he declared that “nothing can be more unfounded and false” than “the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal”; for “it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is contrary to universal observation.” Of course, all Americans who have shared to any extent in Calhoun’s doctrines respecting human society could hardly fail to agree with him in regarding as fallacious and worthless those general propositions in the Declaration which seem to constitute its logical starting point, as well as its ultimate defense. Perhaps, however, the most frequent form of disparagement to which Jefferson’s great state paper has been subjected among us is that which would minimize his merit in composing it, by denying to it the merit of originality. For example, Richard Henry Lee sneered at it as a thing “copied from Locke’s _Treatise on Government_.” The author of a life of Jefferson, published in the year of Jefferson’s retirement from the presidency, suggests that the credit of having composed the Declaration of Independence “has been perhaps more generally, than truly, given by the public” to that great man. Charles Campbell, the historian of Virginia, intimates that some expressions in the document were taken without acknowledgment from Aphra Behn’s tragi-comedy, “The Widow-Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia.” John Stockton Littell describes the Declaration of Independence as “that enduring monument at once of patriotism, and of genius and skill in the art of appropriation”—asserting that “for the sentiments and much of the language” of it, Jefferson was indebted to Chief Justice Brayton’s charge to the grand jury of Charleston, delivered in April, 1776, as well as to the Declaration of Independence said to have been adopted by some citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in May, 1775. Even the latest and most critical editor of the writings of Jefferson calls attention to the fact that a glance at the Declaration of Rights, as adopted by Virginia on the 12th of June, 1776, “would seem to indicate the source from which Jefferson derived a most important and popular part” of his famous production. By no one, however, has the charge of a lack of originality been pressed with so much decisiveness as by John Adams, who took evident pleasure in speaking of it as a document in which were merely “recapitulated” previous and well-known statements