The irony is that this issue (the universality of human rights) was the starting point of the dissent in the colonies in the 1760s that eventually lead to revol

The irony is that this issue (the universality of human rights) was the starting point of the dissent in the colonies in the 1760s that eventually lead to revolt against British rule in 1775. The people in the British colonies supported Parliament during the long revolutionary/counter-revolutionary period that lead up to the passage of the English Bill Of Rights in 1689, which everyone, in 1689, assumed applied to everyone under the rule of the crown. It was only the 1760s that Parliament adopted the attitude that the Bill Of Rights were privileges that only belonged to those who lived in Britain proper -- and the colonists were outraged that the rights they had assumed they had won 80 years earlier were now being denied to them. In 1774, when the government of Virginia asked Thomas Jefferson, to draw up a list of the grievances that the colonies had with Parliament, Jefferson referenced the long history of events that started under the Stuart Kings. When the Founding Fathers eventually drew up a Bill Of Rights for the new nation, most of them wrote things that explicitly suggest that they felt the rights being granted were universal -- in particular, Benjamin Franklin was vehement on the subject, arguing that the Bill Of Rights extended to everyone, including the blacks who were being held in slavery (and when Congress met for the first time in 1789, Franklin pushed a bill to abolish all slavery).