Wbat the Age Owes to America. 
339 
collectively declared on this day, who can be bold enough to say 
when and how independence, liberty, union, would have been com¬ 
bined, confirmed, assured to this people? Behold, now, the great¬ 
ness of our debt to this ancestry, and the fountain, as from a rock 
smitten in the wilderness, from which the stream of this nation’s 
growth and power takes its source. For it is not alone in the 
memory of their wisdom and virtues that the founders of a state 
transmit and perpetuate their influences in its lasting fortunes, 
and shape the character and purposes of its future rulers. “ In the 
birth of societies,” says Montesquieu, “it is the chiefs of a state 
that make its institutions; and afterward it is these institutions that 
form the chiefs of the state.” 
And what was this people, and what their traits and training that 
could just'fy this congress of their great men in promulgating the 
profound views of government and human nature which the Decla¬ 
ration embodies, and expecting their acceptance as ‘‘self-evident?” 
How had their lives been disciplined, and how their spirits prepared 
that the new launched ship, freighted with all their fortunes, could 
be trusted to their guidance with no other chart or compass than 
these abstract truths? What warrant was there for the confidence 
that upon these plain precepts of equality of right, community of 
interest, reciprocity of duty, a polity could be framed which might 
safely discard Egyptian mystery, and Hebrew reverence, and Gre¬ 
cian subtlety, and Roman strength — dispense, even, with English 
traditions of 
“ Primogenity and due of birth, 
Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels.” 
To these questions the answer was ready and sufficient. The 
delegates to this immortal assembly, speaking for the whole coun¬ 
try and for the respective colonies, their constituents might well 
say: 
“ What we are, such are this people. We are not here as vol¬ 
unteers, but as their representatives. We have been designated by 
no previous official station, taken from no one employment or con¬ 
dition of life, chosen from the people at large because they cannot 
assemble in person, and selected because they know our sentiments, 
and we theirs, on the momentous question which our delibera¬ 
tions are to decide. They know that the result of all hangs on the 
