memorable appeal. The propaganda which he carried on when the
Constitution had been adopted was on behalf of a principle which he had
enunciated as a younger man when he drafted the Declaration of
Independence. That document is mainly a rehearsal of the colonists'
grievances, and is as strictly lawyerlike and about as fair or unfair as
the arguments of a Parliamentarian under Charles I. But the
argumentation is prefaced with these sounding words: "We hold these
truths to be self-evident:--that all men are created equal; that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among
these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure
these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just
powers from the consent of the governed." Few propositions outside the
Bible have offered so easy a mark to the shafts of unintelligently clever
criticism.

Jefferson, when he said that "all men are created equal," and the Tory
Dr. Johnson, when he spoke of "the natural equality of man," used a
curious eighteenth century phrase, of which a Greek scholar can see the
origin; but it did not mean anything absurd, nor, on the other hand, did
it convey a mere platitude. It should not be necessary to explain, as
Lincoln did long after, that Jefferson did not suppose all men to be of
equal height or weight or equally wise or equally good. He did, however,
contend for a principle of which one elementary application is the law
which makes murder the same crime whatever be the relative positions of
the murderer and the murdered man. Such a law was indeed firmly rooted
in England before Jefferson talked of equality, but it amazed the rest of
Europe when the House of Lords hanged a peer for the murder of his
servant. There are indefinitely many further ways in which men who are
utterly unequal had best be treated as creatures equally entitled to the
consideration of government and of their neighbours. It is safer to