Several of the amendments and alterations of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, were merely verbal ones, but there were others involving matters of serious import. It has been said that the paragraph commencing with the words "He has waged a cruel war against human nature itself," &c., was not palatable to those delegates who were slave-holders, and that it was stricken out lest it should be a cause for them to cast a negative vote on the question. But there is not the least shadow of evidence to prove that such selfish motives guided any one in that august assembly. On the contrary, it was a high and holy regard for truth and justice, which caused that eloquent paragraph to be stricken out. The Congress in that Declaration was enumerating those aggressions against the rights and privileges of the colonies, justly chargeable upon George III as an individual, having been done by his personal sanction, or by his delegated representatives. Such being the case, it was manifestly unjust, indeed not strictly true, to charge him with the evils concomitant to slavery and the slave-trade.

This trade was begun and carried on, long before the reign of even the first George; and it is not known that George the Third ever gave his assent to anything relating to slavery, except to abolish it and declare the trade a piracy.³³

³³ By a resolution of the Congress of the United States, the slave-trade has been declared a piracy, and the maritime nations of Europe were by that resolution invited to so consider it by the law of nations. Mr. Jefferson was, doubtless, the first man in modern times who denounced the traffic as a "piratical warfare."—See Life of Richard Henry Lee, vol. i., p. 176.