Such is briefly told from the "Journals of Congress" the story of the momentous document in its external details. It has been too well related by Mr. Becker and Mr. Fitzpatrick to leave any excuse for a new account. Writing many years later, John Adams declared "there is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress two years before," and replying to Adams' insinuations, Jefferson admitted that: Pickering's observations, and Mr. Adams' in addition, that it contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentiments hacknied in Congress for two years before ... may be all true. Of that I am not judge. Richard H. Lee charged it as copied from Locke's treatise on Government ... I only know that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had never been expressed before. In another letter to Lee, written in 1825, a year before his death, Jefferson had given, as his last and final statement on the subject: Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent.... Neither aiming at originality of principles or sentiments, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind.... All its authority rests on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, on the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc.