reasons he was placed at the head of the Committee for drafting
the Declaration of Independence. We need not linger over the
familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody knows how
Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first
draft, how the committee of five then reported it to the
Congress, which proceeded to cut out about one-fourth of the
matter, while Franklin tried to comfort the writhing author with
his cheerful story about the sign of John Thompson the hatter.
Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply to the charge of lack of
originality brought against the Declaration by Timothy Pickering
and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at intervals
ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I
gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I
know only that I turned neither to book nor pamphlet while
writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to
invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had
ever been expressed before." O wise young man, and fundamentally
Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back, in that crisis, to the
devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized facts and
accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite of
him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan
reading and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering
called a "commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in
Congress for two years before," into an immortal manifesto to
mankind.

Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical,
dealing with "self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or
doubt these truths dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to
use another term of derogation favored by reactionaries,