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.

If the aristocracy were malignant--though numbers of them were far from
being so--there was also a malignant prejudice aroused against them, and
M. Taine is not far wrong when he says of this prejudice, "Its hard, dry
kernel consists of the abstract idea of equality."--[The French
Revolution. By H. A. Taine. Vol. i., bk. ii.,