[73]
The man in an administrative office, however, must1
make it his first care that everyone shall have what
belongs to him and that private citizens suffer no invasion of their property rights by act of the state. It
was a ruinous policy that Philippus proposed when
in his tribuneship he introduced his agrarian bill.
However, when his law was rejected, he took his
defeat with good grace and displayed extraordinary
moderation. But in his public speeches on the
measure he often played the demagogue, and that
time viciously, when he said that “there were not
in the state two thousand people who owned any
property.” That speech deserves unqualified condemnation, for it favoured an equal distribution of
property; and what more ruinous policy than that
could be conceived? For the chief purpose in the
establishment of constitutional state and municipal
governments was that individual property rights
might be secured. For, although it was by Nature's
guidance that men were drawn together into communities, it was in the hope of safeguarding their
possessions that they sought the protection of cities.
1 The statesman's duty toward (1) property rights,
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