156 THOMAS JEFFERSON 



tions : " 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," etc. In these 

 sentences we may plainly see the result of French 

 teaching. It would be very difficult to find in the files 

 of the House of Commons any such abstract announce- 

 ments of " self-evident truths." The traditional Eng- 

 lish squire would appeal, not to speculation, but to 

 precedent. He would defend his rights, not as the 

 natural rights of men, but as the chartered and pre- 

 scriptive rights of Englishmen. This was because the 

 English squire had a goodly body of prescriptive 

 rights which were worth defending, but the French 

 peasant, who had nothing but prescriptive wrongs, was 

 obliged to fall back upon the natural rights of man. 

 In attempting to generalize about liberty and govern- 

 ment, the French philosophers of that day soon got 

 beyond their depth, as was to have been expected. 

 Such problems cannot be solved by abstract reason, 

 but the attempt to rest the doctrines of civil liberty 

 upon a broad theoretical basis was praiseworthy. 

 Jefferson was always a philosopher as well as a states- 

 man, and he was quite capable of learning from 

 Voltaire and Montesquieu, Rousseau and Diderot, who 

 were then the most suggestive and stimulating writers 

 in the world. It pleased him to give a neat little 

 philosophical turn to the beginning of his great docu- 

 ment, but after this exordium he goes on to the end 

 in the practical tone of the English squire. The king 



