James Madison: < - > 01/19 08:39:38

“Property” 
March 29, 1792 in the National Gazette 
James Madison 
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. 
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 is instituted to protect property of 
every sort; as well that which lies in the various rights of 
individuals, as that which the term particularly 
expresses. This being the end of government, that alone 
is a just government, which impartially secures to every 
man, whatever is his own. 
According to this standard of merit, the praise of 
affording a just securing to property, should be sparingly 
bestowed on a government which, however scrupulously 
guarding the possessions of individuals, does not protect 
them in the enjoyment and communication of their 
opinions, in which they have an equal, and in the 
estimation of some, a more valuable property. 
More sparingly should this praise be allowed to a 
government, where a man's religious rights are violated 
by penalties, or fettered by tests, or taxed by a hierarchy. 
Conscience is the most sacred of all property; other 
property depending in part on positive law, the exercise 
of that, being a natural and unalienable right. To guard a 
man's house as his castle, to pay public and enforce 
private debts with the most exact faith, can give no title 
to invade a man's conscience which is more sacred than 
his castle, or to withhold from it that debt of protection, 
for which the public faith is pledged, by the very nature 
and original conditions of the social pact. 
That is not a just government, nor is property 
secure under it, where the property which a man has in 
his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by 
arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of 
the rest. A magistrate issuing his warrants to a press 
gang, would be in his proper functions in Turkey or 


http://www.vem.duke.edu/POI/madison.pdf