ADAMS of Quincy. I rise, with fear and trembling, to say a few words on this question. It is now forty years since I have intermingled in debate in any public assembly. My memory and strength of utterance fail me, so that it is utterly impossible for me to discuss the subject on the broad ground, on which gentlemen, who have spoken before me, have considered it. The constitution declares, that all men are born free and equal. But how are they born free and equal? Has the child of a North American Indian, when born, the same right which his father has, to his father’s bow and arrows? No—no man pretends that all are born with equal property, but with equal rights to acquire property. The great object is to render property secure. Without the security of property, neither arts, nor manufactures, nor commerce, nor literature, nor science can exist. It is the foundation upon which civilization rests. There would be no security for life and liberty even, if property were not secure. Society is a compact with every individual, that each may enjoy his right for the common good. In the state of nature the Indian has no defence for his little hut, or his venison, or anything that he acquires, but his own strength. Society furnishes the strength of the whole community, for the protection of the property of each individual… .
… The report of the select committee is a compromise, a mutual concession of various parts. The large towns have made quite as great concessions as any part of the country. Suffolk is to have but six senators; in proportion to its property it would have more. The eloquent gentleman from Roxbury [Mr. Dearborn], has alluded, with propriety, to the ancient republics of Athens and Rome. My memory is too defective to go into details, but I appeal to his fresher reading, whether in Athens there were not infinitely greater advantages given to property, than among us. Aris-tides ruined the constitution of Solon, by destroying the balance between property and numbers, and, in consequence, a torrent of popular commotion broke in and desolated the republic. Let us come to Rome; property was infinitely more regarded than here, and it was only while the balance was maintained, that the liberties of the people were preserved. Let us look at the subject in another point of view. How many persons are there, even in this country, who have no property? Some think there are more without it, than with it. If so, and it were left to mere numbers, those who have no property would vote us out of our houses. In France, at the time of the revolution, those who were without property, were in the proportion of fifty to one. It was by destroying the balance, that the revolution was produced. The French revolution furnished an experiment, perfect and complete in all its stages and branches, of the utility and excellence of universal suffrage. The revolutionary government began with the higher orders of society, as they were called, viz., dukes and peers, archbishops and cardinals, the greatest proprietors of land in the whole kingdom. Unfortunately, the first order, although very patriotic and sincere, adopted an opinion that the sovereign power should be in one assembly. They were soon succeeded and supplanted—banished and guillotined, by a second order, and these in their turn by a third, and these by a fourth, till the government got into the hands of peasants and stage-players, and from them descended to jacobins, and from them to sans-culottes… . And thus it has happened in all ages and countries in the world, where such principles have been adopted, and a similar course pursued. All writers agree, that there are twenty persons in Great Britain, who have no property, to one that has. If the radicals should succeed in obtaining universal suffrage, they will overturn the whole kingdom, and turn those who have property out of their houses. The people in England, in favor of universal suffrage, are ruining themselves. Our ancestors have made a pecuniary qualification necessary for office, and necessary for electors; and all the wise men of the world have agreed in the same thing… .
7. Joseph Story on Representation *
Justice Story and Daniel Webster delivered the most memorable speeches in the convention. Both occurred on the representation question, Story’s on December 14, Webster’s the following day, and both defended the taxation basis of the senate in particular. They are interesting from the standpoint of political theory. The idiom and doctrine are conservative, even faintly European. Story’s speech, more than Webster’s, exhibits that calm, dispassionate, and deliberative appeal to men’s reason that had, in his opinion, “so powerful and wholesome an effect” upon the delegates. Story’s work in the convention added significantly to his already considerable reputation. For the past decade he had been a justice of the United States Supreme Court, to which he had been appointed by President Madison, and in that time he had shrugged off the Jeffersonian Republicanism of his youth. Only forty-one years of age in 1820, his remarkable career as a justice and legal scholar still lay ahead of him. Unlike Webster, Story was no orator. He prepared his speech, read it, and furnished a copy to the reporter of the debates.
… It is necessary for us for a moment to look at what is the true state of the question now before us. The proposition of my friend from Roxbury [Mr. Dearborn], is to make population the basis for apportioning the senate, and this proposition is to be followed up,—as the gentleman, with the candor and frankness which has always marked his character, has intimated—with another, to apportion the house of representatives in the same manner. The plan is certainly entitled to the praise of consistency and uniformity. It does not assume in one house a principle which it deserts in another. Those who contend on the other hand, for the basis of valuation, propose nothing new, but stand upon the letter and spirit of the present constitution.
Here then there is no attempt to introduce a new principle in favor of wealth into the constitution. There is no attempt to discriminate between the poor and the rich. There is no attempt to raise the pecuniary qualifications of the electors or elected—to give to the rich man two votes and to the poor man but one. The qualifications are to remain as before, and the rich and the poor, and the high and the low are to meet at the polls upon the same level of equality. And yet much has been introduced into the debate about the rights of the rich and the poor, and the oppression of the one by the elevation of the other. This distinction between the rich and poor, I must be permitted to say, is an odious distinction, and not founded in the merits of the case before us. I agree that the poor man is not to be deprived of his rights any more than the rich man, nor have I as yet heard of any proposition to that effect; and if it should come, I should feel myself bound to resist it. The poor man ought to be protected in his rights, not merely of life and liberty, but of his scanty and hard earnings. I do not deny that the poor man may possess as much patriotism as the rich; but it is unjust to suppose that he necessarily possesses more. Patriotism and poverty do not necessarily march hand in hand; nor is wealth that monster which some imaginations have depicted, with a heart of adamant and a sceptre of iron, surrounded with scorpions stinging every one within its reach, and planting its feet of oppression upon the needy and the dependent. Such a representation is not just with reference to our country. There is no class of very rich men in this happy land, whose wealth is fenced in by hereditary titles, by entails, and by permanent elevation to the highest offices. Here there is a gradation of property from the highest to the lowest, and all feel an equal interest in its preservation. If, upon the principle of valuation, the rich man in a district, which pays a high tax, votes for a larger number of senators, the poor man in the same district enjoys the same distinction. There is not then a conflict, but a harmony of interests between them; nor under the present constitution has any discontent or grievance been seriously felt from this source.
When I look around and consider the blessings which property bestows, I cannot persuade myself that gentlemen are serious in their views, that it does not deserve our utmost protection. I do not here speak of your opulent and munificent citizens, whose wealth has spread itself into a thousand channels of charity and public benevolence. I speak not of those who rear temples to the service of the most high God. I speak not of those who build your hospitals, where want, and misery, and sickness, the lame, the halt and the blind, the afflicted in body and in spirit, may find a refuge from their evils, and the voice of solace and consolation, administering food and medicine and kindness. I speak not of those, who build asylums for the insane, for the ruins of noble minds, for the broken hearted and the melancholy, for those whom Providence has afflicted with the greatest of calamities, the loss of reason, and too often the loss of happiness—within whose walls the screams of the maniac may die away in peace, and the sighs
