"French." But if the preamble be French and philosophical, the
specific charges against the King are very English and practical.
Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with consummate
rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in
Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing
after the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and
sweep and enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in
its illumination of stubborn facts by general principles, its
decent respect to the opinions of mankind, its stately and noble
utterance of national sentiments and national reasons to a
"candid world."

It has long been the fashion, among a certain school of
half-hearted Americans--and unless I am mistaken, the teaching
has increased during the last decades--to minimize the value of
Jefferson's "self-evident truths." Rufus Choate, himself a
consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering
generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them
occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The
essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course
in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary
phrase about governments "deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed." Editors and congressmen and even
college professors have proclaimed themselves unable to assent to
these phrases of the Declaration, and unable even to understand
them. These objectors belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's
category of "nervous persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on
to define them--"whose languid fibres have more analogy with a
passive than an active state of things." Other objectors to the
phrase "all men are created equal" have had an obvious personal