There is a prevalent belief, and with some it accounts for the novelty of recent views, that the Declaration prescribed a Republican form of government as essential for every people, but such is not the fact, as is evident from these words in the document:
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends (referring to the rights and liberties of the people), it is the right of the people to alter and abolish it, and to constitute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that long-established governments should not be changed for light and transient causes.”
Washington expressed this in brief and cogent form as follows: “Every nation has a right to establish that form of government under which it conceives it may live most happy.”
The equality before the law asserted in the Declaration never implied equality of intelligence or opportunity, nor did it necessarily imply universal suffrage as a fixed principle. Between 1776, when the Declaration was issued, and 1789, the time of the adoption of the Constitution, there were in the thirteen States various forms of government, and none of them with universal suffrage. A free people may see fit to restrict or enlarge their own rights; they may confer extreme power upon appointed rulers, or retain all power to themselves,—whichever course is pursued, if it be the people’s unrestricted action, it is in no way inconsistent with the Declaration. Of course this excludes absolutely and forever any idea of a controlling influence by an outside power, or that there can be any such thing as self-government, unless a people are left free to determine for themselves the form and methods of their own government. To those who wrote the Declaration self-government and independence were interconvertible terms, and the burden is upon those who would now distinguish them to invent new definitions. The Declaration did not proclaim that every people in the world were fitted for a Republican form of government,—that form was unquestionably the ideal of the fathers, but the essence of the document was that each nation must determine for itself what form it preferred, and so long as the people were freely consulted, and reserved the right to change when their interests were not properly served, the principles were not infringed upon. This was to be entirely independent of the form adopted; it might be a limited monarchy like England, an armed Republic like France, a Greek, Roman, or South American Republic, a military dictatorship like Mexico, or even a popular despotism like the early days of the Napoleonic empires. The modern idea that fitness was to be determined by some foreign superior nation had not been thought of in 1776.
Take a concrete case like the England of to-day, excluding, of course, her colonies—her ideals may not be the same as ours, but it would be a hazardous statement to make that the rights of the people as set forth in our Declaration are not preserved in England in their full significance quite as well as in our own boss-ridden states and cities. England has a monarchy in form, but a people’s monarchy, and subject to the people’s will, and it may well be questioned whether the people there do not express their will with quite as much facility as here. In many places in this country we have a practical and vulgar despotism under the forms of a Republic,—the people can and do assert themselves when thoroughly aroused, but they are long suffering, and only when the bossism becomes too flagrant and offensive can they be led to enforce that equality before the law and to exhibit that latent power which is necessary to prove that genuine Republicanism still exists.
In dealing with our Indian tribes the government has proceeded upon the theory that they were nations, they have not been taxed, and although our treatment of them has not been creditable, our theories have been consistent; still, I have no idea that the framers of the Declaration believed that these tribes, or Oriental nations, or any semi-civilized peoples were fitted for a Republic, or that for them such a form would be wise or safe; but they did not lose sight of it as the ultimate for every people, and believed that it could only be attained by every people working out their own salvation and by that governmental evolution which through struggle and hardship alone leads to a higher and more stable form. Secretary Hay once incisively expressed it thus: “No people are fit for anything else than self-government,” and it was an eminent Frenchman who truly said, “You cannot have a Republic without Republicans.”
Given the capacity to form some government and you have all the conditions necessary for improvement, and in the Providence of God a people can better be trusted to improve itself than it can to gain in self-government under the subjection of others.
Applying these principles as our fathers stated them, and as they applied them, unless in the case of slavery, and remembering that their sin in that case, however, much forced by their situation, was atoned for from 1861 to 1865 in blood and treasure, the problems relating to inferior races become greatly simplified, for the “white man’s burden” ceases to be war and subjection and becomes a Christian principle in recognizing as the sole right of the stronger his duty to assist and encourage the weaker in the struggle to preserve such government as suits him best and for which he deems himself best fitted.
Abandoning the principles of the Declaration, the white man’s burden means to the black or yellow man political slavery and wrong.