to keep it soft and flexible. His sons followed in his footsteps or were apprenticed to neighboring tradesmen. His daughter went out to service. She performed, indeed, all the duties at present exacted from women of her class; but with them were coupled many others rendered useless by the great improvement that has since taken place in the conveniences of life. She mended the clothes, she did up the ruffs, she ran on errands from one end of the town to the other, she milked the cows, made the butter, walked ten blocks for a pail of water, spun flax for the family linen, and when the year was up received ten pounds for her wages. Yet, small as was her pay, she had, before bestowing herself in marriage on the footman or the gardener, laid away in her stocking enough guineas and joes to buy a few chairs, a table, and a bed.

PART IV

THE DECLARATION

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

THOMAS JEFFERSON

[The committee appointed by the Continental Congress to draft the Declaration consisted of Jefferson, John Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. Jefferson and Adams were appointed a sub-committee, and Jefferson put pen to paper. The document, after being submitted to the other members of the committee, and approved by them, was reported back to the Congress and adopted by that body on July 4, 1776.]

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.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 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 a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to

a Declaration. They poured out treasure and their blood like water, in a contest in opposition to an assertion which those less sagacious and not so well schooled in the principles of civil liberty would have regarded as barren phraseology or mere parade of words. They saw in the claim of the British Parliament a seminal principle of mischief, the germ of unjust power; they detected it, dragged it forth from underneath its plausible disguises, struck at it, nor did it elude either their steady eye or their well-directed blow, till they had extirpated and destroyed it, to the smallest fibre.

On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts; whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.

THE REVOLUTIONARY ALARM

GEORGE BANCROFT

[This spirited bit of prose suggests to the mind at once the account by Sir Walter Scott of the carrying of the Fiery Cross through the highlands of Scotland. This symbol was carried by fleet runners to warn the clansmen to gather for battle.]

DARKNESS closed upon the country and upon the town, but it was no night for sleep. Heralds on swift relays of horses transmitted the war-message from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands; and it was never suffered to droop till it had been borne North and South, and East and West, throughout the land.

It spread over the bays that receive the Saco and the Penob

scot. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and, ringing like buglenotes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliffs of Quebec. The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale.

As the summons hurried to the south, it was one day at New York, in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp to Nansemond, along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onwards and still onwards, through boundless groves of evergreen, to New-Berne and to Wilmington.

"For God's sake, forward it by night and by day," wrote Cornelius Harnett, by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border and despatched it to Charleston, and through pines and palmettos and moss-clad live-oaks, farther to the south, till it resounded among the New England settlements beyond Savannah.

The Blue Ridge took up the voice, and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia. The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers, that the "loud call" might pass through to the hardy riflemen on the Holston, the Watauga, and the French Broad. Ever renewing its strength, powerful enough to create a commonwealth, it breathed its inspiring word to the first settlers of Kentucky; so that hunters who made their halt in the matchless valley of the Elkhorn commemorated the 19th day of April, 1775, by naming their encampment Lexington.

With one impulse the colonies sprung to arms; with one spirit they pledged themselves to each other "to be ready for the extreme event." With one heart the continent cried, "Liberty or Death!”

permanent condition of colonial dependence and subjugation. Nor need we be curious to inquire into any special inducements which France may have had to intervene thus nobly in our behalf.

Nearly two years before the treaties of Franklin were negotiated and signed, the young Lafayette, then but nineteen years of age, a captain of French dragoons, stationed at Metz, at a dinner given by the commandant of the garrison to the Duke of Gloucester, a brother of George III, happened to hear the tidings of our Declaration of Independence, which had reached the duke that very day from London. It formed the subject of animated and excited conversation, in which the enthusiastic young soldier took part, and before he had left the table an inextinguishable spark had been struck and kindled in his breast, and his whole heart was on fire in the cause of American liberty. Regardless of the remonstrances of his friends, of the ministry, and of the king himself, in spite of every discouragement and obstacle, he soon tears himself away from a young and lovely wife, leaps on board a vessel which he had provided for himself, braves the perils of a voyage across the Atlantic, then swarming with cruisers, reaches Philadelphia by way of Charleston, South Carolina, and so wins at once the regard and confidence of the Continental Congress by his avowed desire to risk his life in our service, at his own expense, without pay or allowance of any sort, that, on the 31st of July, 1777, before he was yet quite twenty years of age, he was commissioned a major-general in the army of the United States.

It is hardly too much to say that from that dinner at Metz, and that 31st of July, in Philadelphia, may be dated the train of influences and events which culminated four years afterwards in the surrender of Cornwallis to the allied forces of America and France. Presented to our great Virginian commander-inchief a few days only after his commission was voted by Congress, an intimacy, a friendship, an affection grew up between them almost at sight. Invited to become a member of his mili