Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ADOPTION AND INTERPRETATION OF THE CONSTITUTION The American Revolution was not a struggle precipitated by the workingmen of the colonies; but during the time of agitation preceding the opening of hostilities, the agitators had been quite willing to accept the assistance of the mechanics and of the nonvoters. "In many elections to early revolutionary conventions and congresses, the disfranchised classes voted, sometimes on explicit invitation of the revolutionary committees and sometimes because it was not easy or desirable to stop them." 1 The Declaration of Independence with its emphasis upon equality and the rights of man doubtless made a forceful appeal to the workers of the period. The familiar phraseology of an oft-quoted sentence of the Declaration must have stirred the ambitions and emotions of the wage earners of that day. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." And to secure these rights, it was furtherasserted, governments are instituted. This radical document was written in an epoch which "favored strong families and the ascendancy of an upper class to an extent which our own day American States would not tolerate." 2 Our forefathers were not a group of altruists or supermen whose feet rarely touched the earth; they possessed weaknesses and prejudices similar to those of the men of today. From the earliest colonial times, class distinctions had been fostered by colonial laws and customs. The Declaration was a premature assertion. of democracy. The democracy of 1776 has been aptly termed by Walter Weyl, a "shadow-democracy." lWest, American History and Government, p. 195. 45 ...