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Everyday, in Moscow, the Russians and the tourists troop past the guards of tomb of Lenin, and pours to look down on the corpse of the father of the revolution. Presumably they do so without a shudder, for the body has been preserved by a special chemical process for nearly half a century. These people, however, are not in Moscow, they're in Washington. And they are looking at something which, to Americans, is an equally sacred icon. It is the birth certificate of the United States of America, the Declaration of Independence.
Like Lenin, the Declaration of Independence is guarded day and night, and it also is preserved under a special glass and coated with a chemically treated film which for two centuries has defied the ravages of time. The first signature might well have defied them anyway. It said of a man from Massachusetts, John Hancock, who escaped / capture in the first battle of the War of Independence. Then had his ship/ confiscated and burned by the British. He wrote his signature in this large way, he said, so that the king of England can read it without his glasses. Even today an American handing you, for instance, a contract is up to say, and now if you will just give us your John Hancock. After him the declaration was signed by the five who drafted it. Benjamin Franklin, the 70-year-old sage of Philadelphia. John Adams, a Massachusetts' lawyer, who was to become the second president of the United States; Roger Sherman of Connecticut, once an apprentice shoe maker and now also a lawyer; Robert Livingstone, a New York owner of iron mines; and the 33-year-old Thomas Jefferson of Virginia who wrote practically the whole document. The rest of the signers were a variety of lawyers, merchants, shippers, planters, 56 in all who signed this birth certificate which was also a declaration of war and of revolution. Off hand, they wouldn't strike/ us today as revolutionary types.
At the end of 18 century, the very idea of revolution itself was strange. And there were two sentences written by Tomes Jefferson in that document you've just seen. That were literally world-shaking. The first one was the idea that all men are created equal, and have a right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now there was an awful lot of argument about that phrase. And in the end, the most of the men who signed the declaration sulkily agreed to let happiness stand but then they went home and they wrote in their state constitutions: life, liberty, and the acquisition and protection of property. This was not because / they were tycoons. Property was no dowery, it was the very means of life that they have to ranch out of wilderness. But now look at this; this was the stick of dynamite: to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Well, the idea that if you didn't like the way you were governed, you, being the watch maker or the candlestick maker, that you had some right to overthrow the parliament, the king, the tribal chieftain. This was the firebrand that was to blow up France and the German republic and imperial Russia and eventually the whole idea of empire. But, I think it's fair to say that Americans take a much simpler view of their revolution as a straightforward, heroic/ break with a tyrannical king and parliament an ocean away.