" Rufus Choate, himself a
consummate rhetorician, sneered at those "glittering
generalities," and countless college-bred men, some of them
occupying the highest positions, have echoed the sneer. The
essence of the objection to Jefferson's platform lies of course
in his phrase, "all men are created equal," with the subsidiary
phrase about governments "deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed." Editors and congressmen and even
college professors have proclaimed themselves unable to assent to
these phrases of the Declaration, and unable even to understand
them. These objectors belong partly, I think, in Jefferson's
category of "nervous persons"--"anti-republicans," as he goes on
to define them--"whose languid fibres have more analogy with a
passive than an active state of things." Other objectors to the
phrase "all men are created equal" have had an obvious personal
or political motive for refusing assent to the proposition. But
"no intelligent man," says one of Jefferson's biographers, "has
ever misconstrued it [the Declaration] except intentionally.
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