Soul of a Republic

Here is founding father and author of the first dictionary of the American language Noah Webster on the topic of property in a republic. Sensitive conservatives may want to brace themselves first:

An equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families, is the very soul of a republic – While this continues, the people will inevitably possess both power and freedom; when this is lost, power departs, liberty expires, and a commonwealth will inevitably assume some other form. The liberty of the press, trial by jury, the Habeas Corpus writ, even the Magna Charta itself, although justly deemed the palladia of freedom, are all inferior considerations, when compared with a general distribution of real property among every class of people. (emphasis original)*

If that does not make conservatives howl enough, he was also the father of secular education in America.

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* The Founders’ Constitution, ed. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 1:596.