l American policy must conform, let me state
briefly the general meaning and purpose of this instrument, as I
understand it.

As a result of the discussion for twelve years preceding the
Declaration, the doctrine of the extension of the British Constitution
to the American Colonies, which from their situation, could never be
represented on equal terms in Parliament, was found to be useless for
the protection of American rights, political or civil; and the
doctrine that their rights were dependent on the Colonial Charters was
found to be inadequate, for these Charters, while protecting the civil
rights of the Americans to some extent, proceeded on the theory that
they held all their political rights at the will or whim of Great
Britain. The Americans felt and knew that they were entitled to
political, as well as civil rights, and they all firmly believed that
each so-called "colony" was a free state and subject to no external
control beyond what was necessary to preserve their relationship with
Great Britain on just terms to all the parties. The only question
which the Americans discussed, as soon as they comprehended the whole
situation, was, Why was each so-called "colony" a free state and why
had it always been such? The Declaration of Independence, as I
understand it, gave to the world their solution of this problem. Their
answer, as I understand it, was, that the American Colonies were and
always had been free states, because their relations with the State of
Great Britain were not under the British Constitution and were not
wholly under the Colonial Charters, but were under a supreme and
universal common law, which governs the relations between men,
communities, bodies corporate, states and nations, and which they
called in the Declaration "the Law of Nature and of Nature's God,"
according to which every community on the earth's surface, within
reasonable limits for the formation and execution of a just public
sentiment, is entitled to be a free state,--that is, to be free from
external control, in executing its just public sentiment, except so
far as may be necessary to enable it to conform to the terms of its
just connections with other free states. This doctrine of free
statehood as a universal right is, as I understand it, the central
idea of the Declaration.

Assuming this to be the central idea, let us see how this idea is
reached; and for that purpose, let us notice the exact language of the
Declaration.