32
wholly to occupy the foreign wits, and we have escaped ridicule for this, only because there was not time to bestow it.
As I remarked before, I can well excuse the signers. When the fire begins to take hold of men, and the flames to be sucked in their uostrils; I understand the emergency is too rigorous for them to attend to the duties of the toilet, and to the annointing of themselves with oil. The signers could have had no time to lop the exeresences from the document, unless a stroke of the sword. would have done it. Yet when these men, yea and the genius of our struggling country, felt the strain of a pressure as vehement as that instanced above—when the blood extravasate was spouting from its arteries; the spectacle is presented by the author of the Declaration, of one attempting to amuse their minds with a setting forth of sophisms, and their ears with the soundings of sonorous brass.
How can we complain of "outside barbarians" for lightly esteeming our literature, and scoffing at our pretensions, when we present to them in our first and gravest document, these specimens of unmitigated nonsense? As there is risk that such expressions as the one just uttered, may be taken for mere vituperation, let us refer again to the logic or the want of logic, on which it is founded. In speaking of the unalienable right to life, our Creator was said to have endowed us with, I believe I put the question, "when was this marvelous endowment made?" I may here with propriety propound an other. For how long is the guarantee of this unalienable endowment to run? Does it extend to any definite period beyond death? And if so, when or where shall we make our vindication? If not, then the unalienable endowment amounts to this and no more, that we have a right to life while we live!! This is the "self-evident" truth we all knew just as well before the statement as now. If this truth was a part of our knowledge, it was in our possession. If it was in our possession, it was our own. The cheat then, is in selling us information we were possessed of before; and in making us buy what was our own. The price we pay is in the time and trouble we expend in the detection. Au old story runs to this effect. An expert jockey took the horse of an old man; and having singed it and otherwise clipt and fixed it over, so as for
