It is true that Jefferson
embodied in the Declaration of Independence the speculative theories he
had learned in France, but the impulse to separation came from New
England; and those theories had been long since embodied there in the
practice of the people, if they had never been formulated in distinct
propositions.
I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers, who
look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresight.
An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world never saw. It is
not wise to form any theory and fit our facts to it, as a man in a hurry
is apt to cram his travelling-bag, with a total disregard of shape or
texture. But perhaps it may be found that the facts will only fit
comfortably together on a single plan, namely, that the fathers did have
a conception (which those will call grand who regard simplicity as a
necessary element of grandeur) of founding here a commonwealth on those
two eternal bases of Faith and Work; that they had, indeed, no
revolutionary ideas of universal liberty, but yet, what answered the
purpose quite as well, an abiding faith in the brotherhood of man and the
fatherhood of God; and that they did not so much propose to make all
things new, as to develop the latent possibilities of English law and
English character, by clearing away the fences by which the abuse of the
one was gradually discommoning the other from the broad fields of natural
right.
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