[11] Roberts v. City of Boston, 5 Cushing R., 206.
[12] General Laws of Massachusetts, 1855, Ch. 256, sec. 1.
[13] Part II. ch. 4, p. 23.
[14] Speech on the Oregon Bill, June 27, 1848: Works, Vol. IV. pp. 507, 511, 512; Congressional Globe, 30th Cong. 1st Sess., Vol. XVIII. p. 876. These extravagances found an echo afterwards. Mr. Pettit, a Senator of the United States from Indiana, after quoting the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," proceeded to say: "I hold it to be a self-evident lie. There is no such thing. Sir, tell me that the imbecile, the deformed, the weak, the blurred intellect in man is my equal, physically, mentally, or morally, and you tell me a lie. Tell me, Sir, that the slave in the South, who is born a slave, and with but little over one half the volume of brain that attaches to the Northern European race, is his equal, and you tell what is physically a falsehood. There is no truth in it at all." (Speech in the Senate of the United States, February 20, 1854: Congressional Globe, 33d Cong. 1st Sess., Appendix, Vol. XXIX. p. 214.) Mr. Choate, without descending into the same particularity, seems to have reached the same conclusion, when, in addressing political associates, he characterized the Declaration of Independence as "that passionate and eloquent manifesto of a revolutionary war," and then again spoke of its self-evident truths as "the glittering and sounding generalities of natural right." (Letter to the Maine Whig State Central Committee, August 9, 1856: Works, Vol. I. pp. 214, 215.) This great question was a hinge in the famous debate between Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln in the contest for the senatorship of Illinois, when the former said, in various forms of speech, that "the Declaration of Independence only included the white people of the United States," and the latter replied, that "the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration." (Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas in the Campaign of 1858 in Illinois: see speech of Douglas at Springfield, July 17, and of Lincoln at Galesburgh, October 7; and passim.) Andrew Johnson, speaking in the Senate, showed the side to which he belonged, when he said, after quoting the great words of the Declaration: "Is there an intelligent man throughout the whole country, is there a Senator, when he has stripped himself of all party prejudice, who will come forward and say that he believes that Mr. Jefferson, when he penned that paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, intended it to embrace the African population? Is there a gentleman in the Senate who believes any such thing?... There is not a man of respectable intelligence who will hazard his reputation upon such an assertion." (Congressional Globe, 36th Cong. 1st Sess., December 12, 1859, p. 100.)
[15] Epist. XXX.
[16] Paradise Lost, Book XII. 26.
[17] Locke on Government, Book II. ch. 2, § 4. Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I.
[18] Encyclopédie, art. Égalité Naturelle, Tom. V. p. 415.
[19] Moniteur, 1791, No. 259.
[20] Moniteur, 1793, No. 49.