Criticism of the Declaration of Independence began with the animadversions of John Adams in his letter to Pickering in 1822 and has continued ever since. First, it has been declared that the ideas expressed in the preamble are not new, that “there is not an idea in it,” as Adams said, “but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before;” second, that the document is partisan and that the statement of grievances is unfair to the British Crown and to Parliament; third, that the political philosophy contained in the preamble is false and contrary to the facts of history. Jefferson’s Reply. In a short paper like this it is impossible to examine each of these criticisms in detail. The teacher who is interested can easily find in Friedenwald and in Tyler and in the other authorities mentioned above full and adequate discussion of each of these charges. Here it must suffice to say in answer to the first charge that Jefferson himself in a letter to Madison, dated August 30, 1823, declared, “I did not consider it any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.... I thought it a duty to be, on that occasion, a passive auditor of the opinions of others, more impartial judges than I could be of its merits and demerits.” In other words, Jefferson’s task was not to invent, as French publicists were prone to do on such occasions, new theories of government, but simply to express the ideas which were the product of the political discussion which was going on about him, and which would be familiar and acceptable to the men in America and in Europe to whom the Declaration was addressed. That the document is partisan is of course true; but this is scarcely a valid criticism. Neither Jefferson nor any of his colleagues claimed to sit as judges between the colonies and the mother country. They were bound merely to put their claims as strongly as they could, and then leave the judgment of the case to “a candid world.” Third, as long at the Declaration be studied merely as an historical document, it matters not whether its theories be false or true; it matters only that the student understand how completely its principles dominated the minds of the men who had a share in drawing up the document and the minds of men both in America and in Europe to whom it was addressed. The Declaration Analysed. Coming now to the analysis of the Declaration itself, we find that it falls naturally into three parts. First, there is the preamble in which Jefferson and his colleagues set forth the political theory current in the colonies in 1776; second, there is the enumeration of grievances by which the colonists hoped to prove that the king had violated their sacred rights, and finally there is the conclusion, namely, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states.”