sovereign
autonomy of the individual by virtue of inalienable rights given him
by God. What more natural in their revolt from the old country than to
make this doctrine the political and moral sanction of their course?

The rich emotional life aroused by the war for national independence
as well as the struggle of over half a century later for the
emancipation of the slave have given to these ideas of inalienable
human rights a hold upon the conscience of the nation altogether
incommensurate with their actual validity. It would be a thankless
task and yet an altogether feasible one to show that the Revolutionary
fathers did not break with English traditions in their declarations of
rights. They simply stripped these principles of their original
religious and political setting and persuaded themselves that through
a fresh and rigorous restatement of them they had established their
finality and originality. A stream is not changed by altering the name
it bears at its fountain head. The very enthusiasm and loyalty of the
men of '76 for what has been called "metaphysical jargon" leads one to
suspect that the ultimate basis of these ideas lay in the social
consciousness of the people. The democratic ideals they expressed in
institutional forms--social, political or religious--belonged, of
course, to the social heritage they brought with them from the old
country. They did not, therefore, discover these "lost title deeds of
the human race." It would be much nearer the truth to say they merely
stated them clearly because by virtue of previous training and a new
environment they had succeeded best in realizing those conditions,
social and political, which alone make their clear statement possible.
The measure of success and validity of any social doctrine, no matter
how abstract, is to be found in its harmony with the background from
which it springs and in the extent to which it actually succeeds in
effecting needed social adjustments. It was perfectly natural that our
forefathers should wish to proclaim as a new and unalterable truth,
the everlasting possession of themselves and of all free people, what
they already enjoyed. This did not alter the fact that the only
guarantee for the perpetuity of these rights was the vigorous
democracy of which they were the expression. "The Americans," writes
Jellinek, "could calmly precede their plan of government with a bill
of rights, because that government and the controlling laws had