The Republic and Its First Principles
By Editor
It would seem that a congressman, who writes on so important a subject as "How Is It with the Republic?" ought not to misquote, in an important particular, the great charter of the republic. Yet this is what Congressman R. R. Hitt, the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, does in an article in the Independent of July 6. He says: "The man who wrote in the Declaration of Independence that 'all men are born free and equal' owned his family of slaves." No man ever wrote this in the Declaration of Independence. The nearest to the above in that noble document is "that all men are created equal." Every signer of the Declaration knew that all were not created (or born) free. Many are born in slavery. But, and here is the very pivot or germ of the Declaration, the essential fact of its existence: "all men are born equal" in the matter of inalienable rights, which belong to all alike, however or wherever born, among which are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That many were deprived of these rights did not affect the truth; rather, that fact emphasized it. And the Declaration was made because England was depriving the people of the colonies of some of these rights. This government is now wandering from the great charter, and is about as far afield as she is in time from its adoption. The church needs to return to the Word; the nation to its first principles.