The political doctrine of the Declaration is well known. Summed up in a single phrase, it is commonly called the Compact Theory of Government; that is, that all men are born with certain “natural rights,” that to secure these rights they enter by their own consent into political unions (the compact), that when these natural rights are violated by those whom they have set up to govern them, they have a right to throw off the restraints of government, to enter into a new compact, “to provide new guards for their future security.” It used to be supposed that Jefferson derived this theory of government from the writings of the French philosophers, of whom Rousseau was the most famous. This idea, however, has long since been exploded. We know now that the American revolutionary statesmen from Otis to Jefferson were impregnated with good English ideas, that they looked to John Locke, not to Rousseau, as their master. The teacher should therefore make clear to his students just what the ideas of Locke were and especially the occasion which gave them birth. It is not a matter of chance that Locke’s Treatises on Government were issued in the period of the Revolution of 1688 and the student should be made to understand this. For a full discussion of the almost exact verbal relation between the Declaration of Independence and the writings of Locke the teacher is referred to the books mentioned at the beginning of this paper. The Colonial Grievances. Perhaps the most valuable class exercises in connection with the Declaration of Independence is an analysis of the grievances set forth in the document and the effort to find the specific acts upon which these statements are based. Several of them refer to acts and events whose history is obscure, but most of them can easily be traced to their sources. For a thorough analysis of the grievances, the teacher should go to Friedenwald, Chapters X and XI. Here we can give only the briefest outline. Thus, for instance, a search of the Journals of the Board of Trade will show that at least twenty important laws were rejected or suspended by the Crown in 1773, that the consideration of other laws was neglected sometimes as long as four or five years (Sections 1 and 2); that the king absolutely forbade his governors in 1767 and even earlier to allow the colonial assemblies to organize new counties in the Appalachian region unless they were willing to deprive these counties of representation (Section 3). The facts upon which Sections 4, 5, and 6 are based may be found in almost any school history. The grievances stated in Sections 7 and 8 are again somewhat obscure and cannot therefore be used with profit for class-room discussion. The next three sections, however, refer to acts and events which grew out of the attempted enforcement of the various acts of parliament between 1765 and 1775 and which can therefore be found without difficulty. Sections 12 and 13 likewise are based on facts