have been willing to follow. No one assumes that the Signers foresaw all the temptations and difficulties likely to arise as the nation grew stronger,――that was as impossible as for their wildest dreams to compass its marvellous growth; but they knew full well that the doctrines they asserted would have to meet severe tests and their sublime confidence in the virtue and constancy of the people is the more manifest that they were willing to take the risk of future conditions. If they were wrong in those doctrines, how can we avoid the conclusion that they have been given greater credit for wisdom and foresight than they were justly entitled to, or that the wisdom of all our great statesmen is impugned, who for so many years have asserted and boasted of the truths set forth. What the Revolutionary statesmen urged upon the people as fundamental truths were endorsed as such for more than a century, yet if they were mere phrases or visionary theories, the eloquence and statesmanship of all the great statesmen before our day or in our day, until within a few years, goes for nought. Rufus Choate, to be sure, in the stress of a political campaign urging the claims to the Presidency of James Buchanan, termed the Declaration “glittering and sounding generalities of natural right;” but this was looked upon as exuberant rhetoric, and the expression was never taken seriously by the country, nor accepted as a matured opinion in contravention of the main doctrines of the Declaration. More recently men of standing and character have apparently adopted and even extended Choate’s theory,――it has been maintained that governments rest upon the consent of _some_ of the governed, and this is true and not apart from the Declaration if it means that governments rest upon the will of the majority, for that carries with it the right of all to be heard,――but it is absolutely foreign to the Declaration if by “some of the governed” is intended only the more enlightened part of the people,――that is, the minority,――for then it upholds a theory differing not at all from that of an oligarchy, or even a despotism, and does not represent popular government as we have understood it. It has been said also that the Declaration applied only to civilized peoples, intelligent enough to maintain Republican government, or to those of sufficient capacity to govern themselves and to better themselves by such self-government, or even farther, that the Declaration is untrue as a general proposition and only applied to the existing situation in America in 1776. No such qualifying phrases can be found in the Declaration itself, and if such were in the minds of the statesmen of the day it is passing strange that men who had the power to express themselves in so lucid and straightforward a way never hinted then or thereafter at any such limitations.