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.”
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.