not the restrained and chastened passion which we find in the
great utterances of an American statesman of a later day, Abraham
Lincoln. Compared with Lincoln, Jefferson is indeed a mere
amateur in the use of words. Lincoln would not have scattered in
his utterances overwrought phrases about "death, desolation and
tyranny" or talked about pledging "our lives, our fortunes and
our sacred honour." He indulged in no "Flights of Oratory." The
passion in the Declaration is concentrated against the King. We
do not know what were the emotions of George when he read it. We
know that many Englishmen thought that it spoke truth.
Exaggerations there are which make the Declaration less than a
completely candid document. The King is accused of abolishing
English laws in Canada with the intention of "introducing the
same absolute rule into these colonies." What had been done in
Canada was to let the conquered French retain their own
laws--which was not tyranny but magnanimity. Another clause of
the Declaration, as Jefferson first wrote it, made George
responsible for the slave trade in America with all its horrors
and crimes. We may doubt whether that not too enlightened monarch
had even more than vaguely heard of the slave trade. This phase
of the attack upon him was too much for the slave owners of the
South and the slave traders of New England, and the clause was
struck out.

Nearly fourscore and ten years later, Abraham Lincoln, at a
supreme crisis in the nation's life, told in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia, what the Declaration of Independence meant to him.
"I have never," he said, "had a feeling politically which did not
spring from the sentiments in the Declaration of Independence";
and then he spoke of the sacrifices which the founders of the