providing for manifest new social needs in which English reformers like Romilly and Bentham, and the leaders of the first reformed Parliament, were to be successful somewhat later.  The Americans who so exasperated Dickens vainly supposed themselves to be far ahead of England in much that we now consider essential to a well-ordered nation.  But there could have been no answer to Americans of Jefferson’s generation if they had made the same claim.

It is with this fact in mind that we should approach the famous words of Jefferson which echoed so long with triumphant or reproachful sound in the ears of Americans and to which long after Lincoln was to make a 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 carry this principle too far than not to carry it far enough.  If Jefferson had expressed this and his cognate principle of liberty with scientific precision, or with the full personal sincerity with which a greater man like Lincoln expressed it, he would have said little from which any Englishman to-day would dissent.  None the less he would have enunciated a doctrine which most Governments then existing set at naught or proscribed, and for which Hamilton and the prosperous champions of independence who supported him had no use.