NO ONE SAID SELF-DETERMINATION COMES EASY:

In response to these unjust laws and an advancing British Deep State, the colonists' moral principles--their spirit of liberty--motivated them to act in a certain way (i.e., with vigilance, integrity, and courage). Failure to do so meant a concession to tyranny, which could only result in oppression and then enslavement.

American revolutionaries refused to compromise. They had to act because of who and what they were, because of the choices they had already made, because of the values they held, because of the moral law they chose to live by, because of the kind of society they chose to live in, and because George III and the British Parliament threatened to rob them of all that.

The Declaration of Independence represents a precis of the American's moral and political philosophy, but it is also a call to action--the kind of action that leads in the short term to hardship, penury, and possibly even death, but in the long term to the blessings of a free society.

The Declaration also tells us a good deal about the men who signed it and led the Revolution. They declared to the world their right to self-government and they backed it up with their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. They demonstrated to the world that ideas and actions can and must be unified. 

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