John Locke Quotes
..every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. .... The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.
Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Awnsham Churchill, 1690.
To the pro-slavery politician, abolition was an abdication of government to fulfill it’s 3 major responsibilities. Slaves were private property and government had to safeguard the owner’s right to own that property. Slave owners had always been free in America to hold slaves, and abolition impinged on that freedom. And the slavery advocates knew better than the abolitionists how cruelly the slaves had been treated. They reasoned—that if anyone had treated them that way, they would if they could take revenge and kill the slave owners. Therefore, abolition threatened the lives of Southern citizens. Of course, Brown and his fellow slave-owners did not consider the fact that they had interfered with the right of the slave to own property, they denied him freedom, and in many cases killed slaves as examples or out of neglect. Their “logic” was that slaves were not citizens and therefor were not entitled to these protection.
Day was often associated with left wing causes, but she was very hard to classify in traditional political terms. This quotation shows that unlike most communists and many socialists, she was an advocate of private property although she fought for the ability of a larger proportion of the population to have property.
John Locke FRS was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
