The first paragraph reads:

"When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary
for one people to dissolve the political bands which have
connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers
of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the
laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent
respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should
declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

The "causes of separation" are prefaced by a number of propositions
determining the nature of the "political bands" by which one people
may be "connected with" another. These propositions are all rules of
human conduct, and are therefore principles of law, though they are
called "self-evident truths." This part of the Declaration reads:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are
created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable rights, that among these are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these
rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their
just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever
any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it
is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to
institute new government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their safety and
happiness."

The conception of the universal right of free statehood is reached, in
the Declaration, through a series of three propositions, each stated
to be self-evident, and yet all forming a sequence. The basal
proposition is, that "all men are created equal." Rufus Choate and
John James Ingalls have declared this proposition and the succeeding
one that "all men are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness," to be "glittering generalities." Abraham Lincoln, on
the other hand, in his speech at Gettysburg, at the most solemn and
stirring moment in the country's history, declared that the
proposition that all men are created equal was the foundation-idea of
the nation, to which it was dedicated by the Fathers.

The doctrine of equality arising from the common creation of all men
as the spiritual offspring of a common Creator, was the doctrine of