I. "The miseries we have endured; [This is Art. III of the Declaration.] II. "The peaceful methods which we have ineffectually used for redress; [This is Art. IV of the Declaration.] III. "Declaring at the same time that, not being able any longer to live happily or safely under the cruel disposition of the British court, we had been driven to the _necessity_ of breaking off all connection with her; [This is Art. V of the Declaration.] IV. "At the same time assuring all courts of our peaceful disposition toward them, and of our desire of entering into _trade_ with them." [This is Art. VI of the Declaration.] Here are, _in their order_, the directions for producing the four last articles of the famous document, and which constitute, as a special instrument, all there is of it. Did Mr. Jefferson study this production of Thomas Paine's so closely as to get the _exact order_, without transposing an article? A cursory reading would not do this, and if he did not study it for this purpose, then the same peculiar mind belonged to Jefferson that belonged to Thomas Paine; and in writing the Declaration a greater special miracle was performed than any recorded of Jesus of Nazareth. In the above there is a striking coincidence of documentary facts, in the same order, and it is safe to say there is not one man in a million who, in reading Common Sense, would remember this order, unless he read it with such special purpose. But it is known Jefferson never consulted a book or paper upon the subject, nor for the purpose of producing it. Here is what Bancroft says, and I have found him to be a truthful historian as to current facts touching on the subject: "From the fullness of his own mind, without consulting one single book, Jefferson drafted the Declaration; he submitted it separately to Franklin and John Adams, accepted from each of them one or two verbal unimportant corrections," etc.--Hist., vol. viii, p. 465. The above history is doubtless taken from the reply of Mr. Jefferson to attacks on the originality of the Declaration, which is as follows: "Pickering's observations and Mr. Adams' in addition, 'that it contained no new ideas; that it is a common-place compilation; its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis' pamphlet,' may all be true. Of that I am not to be the judge. Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke's Treatise on Government. Otis' pamphlet I never saw; and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading, I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it."--Works, vol. vii, p. 305. This was written when he was eighty years old.