The Declaration of Independence reveals its daring nature very differently to a modern reader than it did to a reader of its time. Upon its release, the Declaration was actually suppressed from news of the colonial rebellion in places like the Austrian and Russian empires for fear that the people in those regions of Europe might take inspiration from its pronouncements. What mattered to such people at the time was less the second paragraph, with its determinations that “all men are created equal” and that they had the right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” than the list of grievances against King George III that followed those sentiments. While many politicians and intellectuals across Europe— especially in Britain itself—agreed with the Declaration’s Enlightenment ideals of equality and freedom, almost all of the same people saw the hypocrisy in the colonists professing these ideals while maintaining the institution of slavery. They also rejected its list of complaints about the British government’s alleged crimes against the American colonists, who earned on average twenty times the income of the average British peasant of the day and thus were not a particularly sympathetic group of rebels.