The dogma that “government derives its just power from the consent of the governed” is entirely consonant with the book theories of the eighteenth century, and needs to be confronted, and practically is confronted, with the equally good dogma that “governments derive their just power from conformity with the principles of justice.”  We are not to imagine, for instance, that the framers of the Declaration really contemplated the exclusion from political organization of all higher law than that in the “consent of the governed,” or the application of the theory, let us say, to a colony composed for the most part of outcasts, murderers, thieves, and prostitutes, or to such states as today exist in the Orient.  The Declaration was framed for a highly intelligent and virtuous society.

Many writers, and some of them English, have expressed curiosity, if not wonder, at the different fortunes which attended the doctrine of equality in America and in France.  The explanation is on the surface, and need not be sought in the fact of a difference of social and political level in the two countries at the start, nor even in the further fact that the colonies were already accustomed to self-government.

The simple truth is that the dogmas of the Declaration were not put into the fundamental law.  The Constitution is the most practical state document ever made.  It announces no dogmas, proclaims no theories.  It accepted society as it was, with its habits and traditions; raising no abstract questions whether men are born free or equal, or how society ought to be organized.  It is simply a working compact, made by “the people,” to promote union, establish justice, and secure the blessings of liberty; and the equality is in the assumption of the right of “the people of the United States” to do this.  And yet, in a recent number of Blackwood’s Magazine, a writer makes the amusing statement, “I have never met an American who could deny that, while firmly maintaining that the theory was sound which, in the beautiful language of the Constitution, proclaims that all men were born equal, he was,” etc.

An enlightening commentary on the meaning of the Declaration, in the minds of the American statesmen of the period, is furnished by the opinions which some of them expressed upon the French Revolution while it was in progress.  Gouverneur Morris, minister to France in 1789, was a conservative republican; Thomas Jefferson was a radical democrat.  Both of them had a warm sympathy with the French “people” in the Revolution; both hoped for a republic; both recognized, we may reasonably infer, the sufficient cause of the Revolution in the long-continued corruption of court and nobility, and the intolerable sufferings of the lower orders; and both, we have equal reason to believe, thought that a fair accommodation, short of a dissolution of society, was defeated by the imbecility of the king and the treachery and malignity of a considerable portion of the nobility.  The Revolution was not caused by theories, however much it may have been excited or guided by them.  But both Morris and Jefferson saw the futility of the application of the abstract dogma of equality and the theories of the Social Contract to the reconstruction of government and the reorganization of society in France.