Calhoun explicitly rejected the founding principles of equality in the Declaration of Independence, denying that humanity is born free and equal in shared nature and basic needs. He regarded this precept as "the most false and dangerous of all political errors". States could constitutionally take action to free themselves from an overweening government, but slaves as individuals or interest groups could not do so. Calhoun's stance assumed that with the establishment of a concurrent majority, minority groups would influence their own representatives sufficiently to have a voice in public affairs; the representatives would perform strictly as high-minded public servants. Under this scenario, the political leadership would improve and persist, corruption and demagoguery would subside, and the interests of the people would be honored. This introduces the second theme in the Disquisition, and a counterpoint to his concept of the concurrent majority—political corruption. Calhoun considered the concurrent majority essential to provide structural restraints to governance, believing that "a vast majority of mankind is entirely biased by motives of self-interest and that by this interest must be governed". This innate selfishness would inevitably emerge when government revenue became available to political parties for distribution as patronage. Politicians and bureaucrats would succumb to the lure of government lucre accumulated through taxation, tariff duties and public land sales. Even a diminishment of massive revenue effected through nullification by the permanent minority would not eliminate these temptations. Calhoun predicted that electioneering, political conspiracies, and outright fraud would be employed to mislead and distract a gullible public; inevitably, perfidious demagogues would come to rule the political scene. A decline in authority among the principal statesmen would follow, and, ultimately, the eclipse of the concurrent majority. Calhoun contended that however confused and misled the masses were by political opportunists, any efforts to impose majority rule upon a minority would be thwarted by a minority veto. What Calhoun fails to explain, according to American historian William W. Freehling, is how a compromise would be achieved in the aftermath of a minority veto, when the ubiquitous demagogues betray their constituencies and abandon the concurrent majority altogether. Calhoun's two key concepts – the maintenance of the concurrent majority by high-minded statesmen on the one hand; and the inevitable rise of demagogues who undermine consensus on the other – are never reconciled or resolved in the Disquisition. South Carolina and other Southern states, in the three decades preceding the Civil War,