d inalienable rights of the individual, never broke with the feeling
for precedent inherent in the Englishman. The natural rights they
preached were only conceived as having validity within the sphere of
the British subject and not for humanity in general.[141]

In very much the same way the colonists, in the struggles against
royal oppression, felt the need for a higher and more comprehensive
sanction for their conduct and following the precedent set them by the
Puritans of the seventeenth century, they fell back upon the notion of
inalienable rights possessed by each individual independent of
society. Here, too, the inspiration and original setting of these
ideas were strongly religious. Religious toleration had gained
constitutional recognition in almost all the colonies so that the
political movement out of which American freedom was born had the
powerful support of religious sanction. To this fact must be
attributed in part at least the tone of finality and absoluteness in
the American declarations of rights. Out of this universal recognition
of liberty of conscience arose the notion of a right of a higher sort
not inherited but inherent and inalienable because rooted in man's
religious nature--"a God-given franchise."

This sense of the inherent and inalienable nature of the rights of
conscience was, under the stress of the immediate political exigencies
of the struggle with England, very easily and naturally extended from
the sphere of religion to that of civil and political rights. It
provided the sanction for the break with the mother-country that was
contemplated. Virginia's declaration of rights was intended to be law,
for the preamble states that these rights "do pertain to them (the
people of Virginia) and their posterity as the basis and foundation of
government." And what are these rights? They are first of all, "That
all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain
inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society,
they can not by any compact deprive or divest their posterity,
etc."[142] Thus, from the logic of events and not as a result of a
philosophical speculation, the Revolutionary fathers were forced to
take advanced ground in their definition of human rights. Leaving the
fixed social order of the old country for the wilderness, where the
only society was that of the savage, they naturally looked upon
government as arising out of a compact behind which lay the