HE has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature, a right inestimable to them, & formidable to tyrants only. HE has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate & pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained & when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. HE has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome & necessary for the public good. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.
The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of unremitting injuries & usurpations, among which appears no solitary fact to contradict the uniform tenor of the rest but all have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies & such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former systems of government. But when a long train of abuses & usurpations begun at a distinguished period and pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, & to provide new guards for their future security. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light & transient causes and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. WE hold these Truths to be self-evident: that all Men are created equal that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and* inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness: that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles, & organizing it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness. WHEN in the Course of human Events it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth the separate & equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.
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