5 the "Address of the Virginia House
of Burgesses." For these reasons he was placed at the head of the
Committee for drafting the Declaration of Independence. We need not
linger over the familiar circumstances of its composition. Everybody
knows how Franklin and Adams made a few verbal alterations in the first
draft, how the committee of five then reported it to the Congress, which
proceeded to cut out about one-fourth of the matter, while Franklin
tried to comfort the writhing author with his cheerful story about the
sign of John Thompson the hatter. Forty-seven years afterwards, in reply
to the charge of lack of originality brought against the Declaration by
Timothy Pickering and John Adams--charges which have been repeated at
intervals ever since--Jefferson replied philosophically: "Whether I
gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know. I know only
that I turned neither to book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not
consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether
and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before." O wise
young man, and fundamentally Anglo-Saxon young man, to turn his back,
in that crisis, to the devil of mere cleverness, and stick to recognized
facts and accepted sentiments! But his pen retains its cunning in spite
of him; and the drop of hot Welsh blood tells; and the cosmopolitan
reading and thinking tell; and they transform what Pickering called a
"commonplace compilation, its sentiments hackneyed in Congress for two
years before," into an immortal manifesto to mankind.

Its method is the simplest. The preamble is philosophical, dealing with
"self-evident" truths. Today the men who dislike or doubt these truths
dismiss the preamble as "theoretical," or, to use another term of
derogation favored by reactionaries, "French." But if the preamble be
French and philosophical, the specific charges against the King are very
English and practical. Here are certain facts, presented no doubt with
consummate rhetorical skill, but facts, undeniably. The Anglo-Saxon in
Jefferson is basal, racial; the turn for academic philosophizing after
the French fashion is personal, acquired; but the range and sweep and
enduring vitality of this matchless state paper lie in its illumination
of stubborn facts by general principles, its decent respect to the
opinions of mankind, its stately and noble utterance of national
sentiments and national reasons to a "candid world."