[The following is my own translation, but I have had the aid of suggestions from various scholars. It must be obvious that more than one section of the original is now quite unintelligible to the average
American of the sort using the Common Speech. What would he make, for example, of such a sentence as this one: “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”? Or of this: “He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise.” Such Johnsonian periods are quite beyond his comprehension, and no doubt the fact is at least partly to blame for the neglect upon which the Declaration has fallen in recent years.
