William Penn on property as one of the three fundamental rights all men have (1679)

William Penn was a religious dissident who spent time in prison for his opposition to the way Quakers were treated by the state during the 1670s. As the owner and founder of what was to become Pennsylvania he was in a good position to put his religious and political principles into practice when drawing up a constitution or “Frame of Government” in 1681. This petition written in 1679 shows the direction his ideas were taking in the years immediately preceding this. Penn believed in the idea that Englishmen had rights which predated the coming to power of any king and it was their duty to insist that they be recognized when kings overstepped their powers which had happened repeatedly after the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660. In the opening to this statement Penn mentions Three Fundamental Rights, namely property, making the laws, and being judged by juries for transgressions of those laws. The danger however was that the people had forgotten what their rights were and so Penn wanted to remind them “lest through Ignorance of your own Strength and Authority, you turn Slaves to the Humours of those, that properly and truly are but your Servants, and ought to be used so.” As Penn rightly says at the end of the paragraph, “Mark that”!