THE AMERICAN IDEA.

1600-1775.

In a survey of American Institutions there seem to be three fundamental principles on which they are based:  first, that all men are naturally equal in rights; second, that a people cannot be taxed without their own consent; and third, that they may delegate their power of self-government to representatives chosen by themselves.

The remote origin of these principles it is difficult to trace.  Some suppose that they are innate, appealing to consciousness,—­concerning which there can be no dispute or argument.  Others suppose that they exist only so far as men can assert and use them, whether granted by rulers or seized by society.  Some find that they arose among our Teutonic ancestors in their German forests, while still others go back to Jewish, Grecian, and Roman history for their origin.  Wherever they originated, their practical enforcement has been a slow and unequal growth among various peoples, and it is always the evident result of an evolution, or development of civilization.

In the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson asserts that “all men are created equal,” and that among their indisputable rights are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  Nobody disputes this; and yet, looking critically into the matter, it seems strange that, despite Jefferson’s own strong anti-slavery sentiments, his associates should have excluded the colored race from the common benefits of humanity, unless the negroes in their plantations were not men at all, only things or chattels.  The American people went through a great war and spent thousands of millions of dollars to maintain the indissoluble union of their States; but the events of that war and the civil reconstruction forced the demonstration that African slaves have the same inalienable rights for recognition before the law as the free descendants of the English and the Dutch.  The statement of the Declaration has been formally made good; and yet, whence came it?

If we go back to the New Testament, the great Charter of Christendom, in search of rights, we are much puzzled to find them definitely declared anywhere; but we find, instead, duties enjoined with great clearness and made universally binding.  It is only by a series of deductions, especially from Saint Paul’s epistles, that we infer the right of Christian liberty, with no other check than conscience,—­the being made free by the gospel of Christ, emancipated from superstition and tyrannies of opinion; yet Paul says not a word about the manumission of slaves, as a right to which they are justly entitled, any more than he urges rebellion against a constituted civil government because it is a despotism.  The burden of his political injunctions is submission to authority, exhortations to patience under the load of evils and tribulations which so many have to bear without hope of relief.