“This term in its particular application means "that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual."
In its larger and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage.
In the former sense, a man's land, or merchandize, or money is called his property.
In the latter sense, a man has a property in his opinions and the free communication of them.
He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.
He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of his person.
He has an equal property in the free use of his faculties and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.”
The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962), Volume 1, Chapter 16, Document 23
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s23.html.
In this short and powerful essay, Madison says that a person’s opinions, thoughts and religion are one’s property, to be valued and respected in the same way as the physical things to which one may make claim. Madison also points out:
“Where an excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected. No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his possessions.
Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is the same, tho’ from an opposite cause.”
Government, in the mind of Madison, has the responsibility to protect the property of each of us from the powerful. But once government is established we must be on our guard, for:
“If there be a government then which prides itself in maintaining the inviolability of property; which provides that none shall be taken directly even for public use without indemnification to the owner, and yet directly violates the property which individuals have in their opinions, their religion, their persons, and their faculties; nay more, which indirectly violates their property, in their actual possessions, in the labor that acquires their daily subsistence, and in the hallowed remnant of time which ought to relieve their fatigues and soothe their cares, the influence will have been anticipated, that such a government is not a pattern for the United States.
If the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights: they will rival the government that most sacredly guards the former; and by repelling its example in violating the latter, will make themselves a pattern to that and all other governments.”
To the Founding Fathers, there was both a respect for and a fear of government, for they realized a free people must have a government that respects their property as well as their rights. This means a government that is limited in its scope and restricted in its power, nowhere more than as it relates to their property, in both the form of their opinions as well as their wallet.
As the American people enter the Presidential campaign season, they should keep in mind Madison’s words. We live at a time of ever growing taxation focused on an ever shrinking proportion of the population. Once government becomes used to taking away one man’s possessions to give it to another, especially when it has the encouragement of the majority, it is not far from restricting one man’s opinion or religion in favor of another’s. For Madison is right: There is no difference between property and rights.
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