The Peril of the Republic of the United States of America - Percy T. Magan

which, taking its place among the nations,
announced that it stood only on right, and claimed
no sovereignty inconsistent with right.”[3]
In 1837 John Quincy Adams in a Fourth of July
oration at Newburyport, said:--
“The sovereign authority conferred upon the
people of the colonies by the Declaration of
Independence could not dispense them, nor any
individual citizen of them, from the fulfilment of
their moral obligations. The people who assumed
their equal and separate station among the powers
of the earth, by the laws of nature’s God, by that
very act acknowledged themselves bound to the
observance of those laws, and could neither
exercise nor confer any power inconsistent with
them.”
Still further alluding to the self-imposed
restraints upon the sovereignty which had been
established, he said:--
“The Declaration acknowledged the rule of
18