On the record
If a despot can seize and confiscate the property of his subject at pleasure, the subject will not acquire property, and thereby give to himself the conspicuousness that invites the plunder.
Source
gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “If a despot can seize and confiscate the property of his subject at pleasure, the subject will not acquire property, and…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann warns that despotic control over property discourages individuals from acquiring wealth.
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More from Horace Mann
The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.
The kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.
These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.
Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.
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