John Adams agreed with Webster, writing of “PROPERTY” in his Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, 1787 (The Works of John Adams, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1850-56):
“Property is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.
Perhaps, at first, prejudice, habit, shame or fear, principle or religion, would restrain the poor from attacking the rich, and the idle from usurping on the industrious;
but the time would not be long before courage and enterprise would come, and pretexts be invented by degrees, to countenance the majority in dividing all the property among them, or at least, in sharing it equally with its present possessors.
Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted …”