With the power of the pen, he had articulated a new premise for the government of humanity: that all men were created equal. He basically meant all white men, especially propertied ones, but the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for one, recognized the import of the document adopted in Philadelphia. Attacking the declaration from London, Bentham scoffed at the idea that every man had a natural, God-given right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; such assertions, Bentham said, were “absurd and visionary,” and he likened the American political thinking to
