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.]