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