rights disregarded. They will forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect of their rights. The shackles, therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive, or expire, in a convulsion.”

Many of us now see the truth of this prophecymany of the present and of the coming generation may see and feel it both.

Mr Jefferson was among the first to perceive the fallacy of sustaining individual rights at the expense of the general welfare. With our English ancestors, the first struggle for civil liberty, was to guard the property of the private citizen against the encroachments of the crown and of the nobility. All that was thus gained to untitled individuals was considered as subtracted from an arbitrary and irresponsible power, over which the people possessed no control. With us, the government is not an independent and irresponsible power, but the agent of the people, and controlled by their will. There is, therefore, and there can be, under our form of government, no permanent usurpation on the part of those who administer it, and from this source we have no arbitrary influence to apprehend that the ordinary remedy of election may not effectually control.

The same right to acquired property which may be indispensable to the private citizen, who needs a defence. against the usurpation of hereditary power, is not called for under a republican government, where nothing can be assumed by those in authority which does not immediately revert to the people. What Justice Blackstone,

therefore, in speaking of the British constitution, might correctly term a private right, would operate with us, as

a public wrong.

Many principles which we have adopted under the name of individual or private rights, and which originally obtained as a necessary defence against arbitrary power, are wholly inapplicable under our form of government, and so far as persisted in, place individuals and incorporated associations above the control of law, and wholly independent of what is usually considered the province of legislation. They are invested with privileges that were created as a defence against abuses which can have no existence in a free commonwealth.

That principle, therefore, which universally prevails, and which is adopted and placed upon the most stable foundation among us,-the existing RIGHT to PROPERTY, -is in fact an arbitrary principle, with no foundation in natural justice, having been originally set up to counteract other and greater usurpations, and preserve something like a balance of power in the miserable schemes of government which have hitherto afflicted the human family. The Right to Property, as now sustained to individuals, and as in some measure aggravated by charters to associations, may be considered the only permanent usurpation that can exist under our constitution. It tolerates an inequality of possession that must forever prove fatal to republicanism, and gives to a successful few as galling a superiority over the multitude as could be conferred by hereditary rank, or by any other usurpation that prevails under more arbitrary forms of government. Upon this subject the American people will soon require a reform. They will eventually effect one. In