alities
used for the further production of wealth.

Whatever the future may bring, we must start with the institution of
private property recognized to its fullest extent. It is expressly
guaranteed in our Federal Constitution, as for the matter of that it
was also in Magna Charta, as clearly as the right to liberty, and
usually in the very same clause. Not only that, but when we adopted
our first State constitutions, from 1776 to 1788, and the Federal
Constitution in 1789, every one of them made express guarantee of this
right. One or two, following the lead of Massachusetts and Virginia,
recognized equality also, or, at least, equality by birth and before
the law; but without exception property was expressly recognized as
one of two leading constitutional rights, and even in some States,
like Virginia, it was termed a natural right. The same thing is
true of the Massachusetts Bill of Rights and in the Federal Fifth
Amendment, though it is significant that the Declaration of
Independence omits the word _property_, and only mentions among
unalienable rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--which
some courts have held to include private property.[1] Nevertheless,
under our constitutions to-day, the right is not only doubly, but even
triply, guaranteed; that is to say, by all State constitutions against
State action; by the Federal Constitution against national action;
and finally, by the Federal government in the Fourteenth Amendment
as against State action also. This is the reason why, in any case
affecting a cardinal liberty or property right, a litigant may
carry his case not only through the State courts, which have sole
jurisdiction of ordinary business and domestic matters, but to the
courts of the United States as well.

[Footnote 1: Justice Brewer, in the _Yale Law Review_, for June, 1891.
He holds that under "the pursuit of happiness" comes the acquisition,
possession, and enjoyment of property, and that they are matters which
even government cannot forbid nor destroy. That, except in punishment
for crime, no man's property can be taken without just compensation,
and he closes: "Instead of saying that all private property is held at
the mercy of the public, it is a higher truth that all rights of the
state in the property of the individual are at the expense of the
people."]

When we come to legislation on the subject, or to modern State
constitutions, there is hardly a change in this particular