DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. 46 DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

tion, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining, in the meantime, exposed to all the danger of invasion from without and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for the naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies, without the consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.

He has combined, with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment, for any murders which they should

commit on the inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent: For depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries, so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the powers of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legis late for us in all cases whatsoever.

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..

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 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.

He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian sav

ages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is untit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts made by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circum-. stances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connection and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as free and independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And, for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

The fifty-six signers of the Declaration were as follows: Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, and Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut; Cæsar Rodney, George Read, and Thomas McKean, of Delaware; Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton, of Georgia; Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, of Maryland; John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, and Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts; Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, and Matthew Thornton, of New Hampshire; Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, and Abraham Clark, of New Jersey; William Floyd. Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, and Lewis Morris, of New York; William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, and John Penn, of North Carolina; Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, and George Ross, of Pennsylvania; Stephen Hopkins and William Ellery, of Rhode Island: Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jun., Thomas Lynch, Jun., and Arthur Middleton, of South Carolina; and George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jun., Francis Lightfoot Lee, and Carter Braxton, of Virginia.

The unanimous Declaration of the intan maids States of America,

47

now prevailing." As this placed no restriction upon Confederate privateers, the negotiations were dropped. In the war between the United States and Spain, in 1898, both belligerents formally announced their intention to adhere to the principles of the Declaration. It may be said that the second, third, and fourth principles are a recognized part of the body of international law. The question of privateering has thus far been regarded rather as one of national policy. With the development of modern navies, however, it has become of minor significance. Consult the authorities referred to under MARITIME LAW; INTERNATIONAL LAW.

DECLARATION OF WAR. A formal announcement of hostile intentions, by one State to another. It is a survival of the feudal custom of sending heralds to give the enemy warning of impending hostilities. The doctrine that notice must be given an enemy before entering upon war has never grown into an obligation, and since the middle of the eighteenth century the practice has so largely decreased that it may be concluded that a formal declaration is not required by morality or international law. The later custom of publication by a belligerent in its own territory, at the outbreak of war, of a manifesto discussing the questions at issue, and justifying its position, which should be communicated to neutrals, never has assumed the weight of an obligation, though useful both to subjects of the State and to those of neutrals.

ask the court to declare a mere abstract fact or right. The existence of this special form of action has contributed to diffuse in Scotland a false view as to the nature of actions and judicial proceedings generally.

DECLENSION (Fr. déclinaison, Lat. declentio, from declinare, to bend, from de, down + *clinare, Gk. Kλivew, klinein, to bend, Lith. szlýti, to incline, Skt. śri, to lean). A grammatical term applied to the system of modifications called cases, which nouns, pronouns, and adjectives undergo in many languages. How the words declension (Lat. declinatio, a declining, or leaning away) and case (Lat. casus, a fall) came to be applied to this species of inflection, has never been made altogether clear. The relations in which one thing stands to other things may be expressed in either of two ways. Some languages make use of separate words, called prepositions; in others, the relations are expressed by changes in the termination of the name of the thing. Thus, in Latin, reg being the root or crude form of the word for 'king,' regs, or rex, is the word in the nominative case, signifying 'a king' as subject or agent; regis, in the genitive case, ‘of a king;' regi, in the dative, 'to a king,' etc. An adjective joined to a noun usually takes a corresponding change. The number of cases is very different in different languages. The further we go back in the history of the Indo-European languages, the richer do we generally find them in these modifications. Sanskrit had eight cases, Latin six, and Greek five. The names of the Latin cases, which are often used also in regard to the English language, are the nominative, which names the subject or actor; the genitive, expressing the source whence something proceeds, or to which it belongs-it is sometimes called the adjective case; the dative, that to which something is given, or for which it is done; the accusative, the object toward which an action is directedit completes the meaning of a transitive verb; the vocative, the person addressed or called; and the ablative, that from which something_is taken. The Greek has no ablative case. Sanskrit, in addition to the Latin cases, has an instrumental and a locative case. The grammar of the inflective languages is complicated by the circumstance that all nouns do not form their cases in the same way. This makes it necessary to distribute nouns into various classes, called 'declensions.' In Latin, as many as five declensions are usually given. (See IN

The

Under conditions of modern intercourse, a State can never be taken by surprise. A period of negotiation is followed by an ultimatum in the form of a demand, refusal of which involves war. Thus, the United States demanded of Spain her withdrawal from Cuba in April, 1898, on condition of war. A later act of Declaration was passed by Congress on April 25th, fixing the date of hostilities as April 21st. This was important, as determining the date for legal purposes. On January 13, 1904, the Japanese minister delivered to the Russian government a note containing proposals relative to the matters in dispute between the two powers, a prompt reply to which was requested, the implication being that in the event of unreasonable delay, Japan would take hostile action. Formal declarations of war were issued by both governments on February 10, two days after the commencement of hostilities. When not fixed by direct notice, war is held to date from the first act of hostilities by either party. The United States began the War of 1812 by invading Canada, and seizing British _FLECTION.) As we descend, the case-endings vessels in port; and in 1854 the British fleet en- become rubbed off, as it were, and prepositions tered the Black Sea to compel the Russian fleet are used in their stead. The languages descended to return to Sebastopol before the ambassadors from the Latin (French, Italian, etc.) have lost had withdrawn. On the other hand, the French all the cases of nouns and adjectives. The Teuchargé d'affaires handed a formal notice to Bis- tonic languages in their early periods had cases marck in 1870, and Russia declared war upon almost as numerous and perplexing as those of Turkey in 1877 by a formal dispatch. the Latin. German is still to a great extent incumbered with them. Modern English has only one case in nouns different from the nominative-namely, the genitive, or possessive. NOUN.) The declension of pronouns (q.v.) has been more persistent than that of nouns and adjectives. Languages of the agglutinative order have, in general, a great abundance of cases. In Finnish, nouns have fifteen cases, if by case is understood an inflectional form produced by joining on a suffix which takes the place of a prepo

DECLARATOR, ACTION OF. A form of action peculiar to the law of Scotland, the object of which is judicially to ascertain a fact, leaving its legal consequences to follow as a matter of course. The declaratory conclusions of such actions are generally followed by petitory, or possessory actions, for the purpose of giving effect to the right declared. A substantial interest on the part of the pursuer, or plaintiff, must be shown in all cases, as it is not competent to

(See