after the transactions of Independence, this is not wonderful.  Nor should I, at the age of eighty, on the small advantage of that difference only, venture to oppose my memory to his, were it not supported by written notes, taken by myself at the moment and on the spot.  He says, ’The committee of five, to wit, Doctor Franklin, Sherman, Livingston, and ourselves, met, discussed the subject, and then appointed him and myself to make the draught; that, we, as a sub-committee, met, and after the urgencies of each on the other, I consented to undertake the task; that, the draught being made, we, the sub-committee, met, and conned the paper over, and he does not remember that he made or suggested a single alteration.’  Now these details are quite incorrect.  The committee of five met; no such thing as a sub-committee was proposed, but they unanimously pressed on myself alone to undertake the draught.  I consented; I drew it:  but before I reported it to the committee, I communicated it separately to Doctor Franklin and Mr. Adams, requesting their corrections, because they were the two members of whose judgments and amendments I wished most to have the benefit, before presenting it to the committee:  and you have seen the original paper now in my hands, with the corrections of Doctor Franklin and Mr. Adams interlined in their own hand-writings.  Their alterations were two or three only, and merely verbal.  I then wrote a fair copy, reported it to the committee, and from them, unaltered, to Congress.  This personal communication and consultation with Mr. Adams, he has misremembered into the actings of a sub-committee.  Pickering’s observations, and Mr. Adams’s in addition, ’that it contained no new ideas, that it is a common-place compilation, its sentiments hacknied in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis’s pamphlet,’ may all be true.  Of that I am not to be the judge.  Richard Henry Lee charged it as copied from Locke’s Treatise on Government.  Otis’s pamphlet I never saw, and whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection I do not know.  I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it.  I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether, and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.  Had Mr. Adams been so restrained, Congress would have lost the benefit of his bold and impressive advocations of the rights of Revolution.  For no man’s confident and fervid addresses, more than Mr. Adams’s, encouraged and supported us through the difficulties surrounding us, which, like the ceaseless action of gravity, weighed on us by night and by day.  Yet, on the same ground, we may ask what of these elevated thoughts was new, or can be affirmed never before to have entered the conceptions of man?