The Code of Alabama: Political

SECTION 1. Be it enacted by the Legislature of Alabama, That the work prepared by James J. Mayfield under "An act to provide for the revision, codification, digesting, and promulgating of the public statutes of this state, both civil and criminal," approved September 30th, 1903, is as the same has been revised, amended, corrected, and reported by the joint committee of the two houses of the Legislature, which is shown upon the sheets of manuscript signed by the chairman of the joint committee, adopted and enacted as the Code of Alabama, and shall regulate completely, so far as a statute can, the subject to which it relates, and shall go into force and be operative on the thirtieth day after the date of the governor's proclamation announcing its publication.

SEC. 2. No act passed on or after the ninth day of July, 1907, shall be repealed or affected in any manner by the adoption of this Code. All acts amending sections of the Code of 1896, which sections have been incorporated in this Code, shall be printed in the place of and as

such sections.

SEC. 3. All acts of the present session of the legislature passed on and after July 9th, 1907, which are of a general nature, shall be incorporated in the Code at the appropriate place with reference to its subject-matter, and become and be published as a part of the Code,

80 that

every statute of a general nature of this state, in force at the time of publication of the Code, shall be incorporated therein.

SEC. 4. The section of the manuscript corresponding to section 1370 of the Code of 1896, be, and is hereby, stricken out, and not carried into the new Code.

Approved July 27, 1907.

1-AC-VOLI

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776.

THE UNANIMOUS DECLARATION OF THE THIRTEEN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

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 and 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.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:-that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and 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 to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate, that governments long established should not be changed for light and 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. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, 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, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of

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