Browse our archive of original historical documents on the themes of this book:

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- Women and the Right to Vote

- Women and the Family

- Was the Founding Undemocratic? The Property Requirement for Voting

- Poverty and Welfare

- Immigration and the Moral Conditions of Citizenship

- Afterword: Liberals and Conservatives Abandon the Principles of the Founding

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Home > Document Library > Was the Founding Undemocratic? The Property Requirement for Voting > Note on voting rights during the Convention for Amending the Constitution of Virginia


Note on voting rights during the Convention for Amending the Constitution of Virginia

James Madison
1829


 

It would be happy if a state of society could be found or framed, in which an equal voice in making the laws might be allowed to every individual bound to obey them. But this is a theory, which like most theories, confessedly requires limitations and modifications; and the only question to be decided in this as in other cases, turns on the particular degree of departure, in practice, required by the essence and object of the theory itself.

[From Marvin Meyers, ed., Mind of the Founder: Sources of the Political Thought of James Madison, rev. ed. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981), 407.]





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