"Power naturally grows...because human passions are insatiable. But that power alone can grow which already is too great; that which is unchecked, that which has no equal power to control it." John Adams.
"Wealth tends to corrupt the mind and to nourish its love of power, and to stimulate it to oppression. History proves this to be the spirit of the opulent." Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention. 11
Modern American folklore assumes that democracy and liberty are all but identical...But the Founding Fathers thought that the liberty with which they were most concerned was menaced by democracy. In their minds liberty was linked not to democracy but to property. 13-14
Among the many liberties, therefore, freedom to hold and dispose property is paramount. Democracy, unchecked rule by the masses, is sure to bring arbitrary redistribution of property, destroying the very essence of Liberty. 15
"Freedom for property would result in liberty for men--perhaps not for all men but at least for all worthy men. Because men have different faculties and abilities, the Fathers believed, they acquire different amounts of property. To protect property is only to protect men in the exercise of their natural faculties." 15
"...democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy that did not commit suicide" John Adams.
"Those who own the country ought to govern it" John Jay (Founding Father) "...to the Fathers this was simply a swift axiomatic statement of the stake-in-society theory of political rights..." 20
"Men like Hamilton could argue that manufactures ought to be promoted because they would enable the nation to use the labor of women and children, 'many of them at a tender age,' but Jefferson was outraged as such a view of humanity. Hamilton schemed to get the children into factories; Jefferson planed school systems". 55
"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonius reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, to sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and institutions...But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand and hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regime of their barbarous ancestors." Thomas Jefferson
"As a nation we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negros and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty,--to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base allow of hypocrisy." 131
Inasmuch as most good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has so happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored, and other have without labor enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government."136
In 1860, where shoemakers were on strike: "I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to, where they are not obliged to work under all circumstances, and are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not! "137
"Had he [Lincoln] lived to seventy, he would have seen the generation brought up on self-help come into its own, build oppressive business corporations, and begin to close off those treasured opportunities for the little man. Furthermore, he would have seen his own party become the jackal of the vested interests, placing the dollar far, far ahead of the man."
"...men recognized that corporations had become indispensable in the business world, that it was folly to try to prohibit them, but that it was also folly to leave them without thorough-going control. Government must now interfere to protect labor, to subordinate the big corporation to the public welfare, and to shackle cunning and fraud. Theodore Roosevelt 293
"Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration...I wish to see labor organizations powerful" TR 301
