The equality before the law asserted in the Declaration never implied equality of intelligence or opportunity, nor did it necessarily imply universal suffrage as a fixed principle. Between 1776, when the Declaration was issued, and 1789, the time of the adoption of the Constitution, there were in the thirteen States various forms of government, and none of them with universal suffrage. A free people may see fit to restrict or enlarge their own rights; they may confer extreme power upon appointed rulers, or retain all power to themselves,――whichever course is pursued, if it be the people’s unrestricted action, it is in no way inconsistent with the Declaration. Of course this excludes absolutely and forever any idea of a controlling influence by an outside power, or that there can be any such thing as self-government, unless a people are left free to determine for themselves the form and methods of their own government. To those who wrote the Declaration self-government and independence were interconvertible terms, and the burden is upon those who would now distinguish them to invent new definitions. The Declaration did not proclaim that every people in the world were fitted for a Republican form of government,――that form was unquestionably the ideal of the fathers, but the essence of the document was that each nation must determine for itself what form it preferred, and so long as the people were freely consulted, and reserved the right to change when their interests were not properly served, the principles were not infringed upon. This was to be entirely independent of the form adopted; it might be a limited monarchy like England, an armed Republic like France, a Greek, Roman, or South American Republic, a military dictatorship like Mexico, or even a popular despotism like the early days of the Napoleonic empires. The modern idea that fitness was to be determined by some foreign superior nation had not been thought of in 1776. Take a concrete case like the England of to-day, excluding, of course, her colonies――her ideals may not be the same as ours, but it would be a hazardous statement to make that the rights of the people as set forth in our Declaration are not preserved in England in their full significance quite as well as in our own boss-ridden states and cities. England has a monarchy in form, but a people’s monarchy, and subject to the people’s will, and it may well be questioned whether the people there do not express their will with quite as much facility as here. In many places in this country we have a practical and vulgar despotism under the forms of a Republic,――the people can and do assert themselves when thoroughly aroused, but they are long suffering, and only when the bossism becomes too flagrant and offensive can they be led to enforce that equality before the law and to exhibit that latent power which is necessary to prove that genuine Republicanism still exists.