Ch. XIV.]
DRAFT OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
413
| ing fundamentally the forms of our governments; for suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. | valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments; for suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us all cases whatsoever. |
| He has abdicated government here, withdrawing his governors, and declaring us out of his allegiance and protection. | He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection, and waging war against us. |
| He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. | Not altered. |
| He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy, unworthy the head of a civilized nation. | He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, to complete the works of death, destruction and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely, paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation. |
| He has constrained our fellow-citizens taken captive on the high seas to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands. | Not altered. |
| He has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of the frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions of existence. | He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of the frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. |
| He has excited treasonable insurrections of our fellow-citizens, with the allurements of forfeiture and confiscation of our property. | Struck out. |
| He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of INFIDEL powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty, of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of one | Struck out. |
