Perhaps in the divine plan, all men are indeed “created equal.” Here on earth they patently are not. Jefferson’s opening hyperbole was never meant to be taken literally. But he did mean for the closing lines to be taken, at international law, for precisely what they were--a declaration that the colonies once tied to Britain, were now _free and independent States_-- and that as Free and Independent States, they have full power to levy War, contract Alliances, establish Commerce and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. In that moving Declaration, nothing was said of the birth of a “nation.” In truth, nothing was said of a “nation” in the Articles of Confederation, or in the Constitution that succeeded the Articles. The Declaration was the act of “one People,” but the political aim in the decade that followed the Declaration of 1776 was to form a more perfect Union--a union of separate, sovereign States, acting jointly for some purposes, but acting individually for others. And the political genius of the founding architects who designed this structure is the very genius so widely disdained by the busy planners and amateur carpenters of our own time. What did the Declaration assert the function of government to be? Why is it that governments are instituted among men? The answer, in Jefferson’s phrase, is that governments are instituted among men to _secure rights_--not to grant rights, which a free people have to begin with, but only to secure rights. And where does government derive its powers in this regard? It derives its just powers “from the Consent of the Governed,” and from no other source. How is this consent manifested? The answer lies in the whole of the republican process, which in the United States is a process exercised entirely through the actions of the people _in their States_.