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We are charged this evening with the consideration of a topic too broad for my competence, if it is to be assumed that by the words Founding Fathers we mean the fifty-five delegates from twelve states who spent four months at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 thrashing out the Constitution by which this nation has since been governed.

Who knows for sure what that disparate group had in mind through those long, hot months -- or even, for that matter, what any single one of them intended?

Intent is a slippery matter, and one which, as an editor, I tell my reporters to avoid. It is all very well to say who did what, when and where, but not in a newspaper (except on the editorial page) to have the arrogance to guess why.

Charles A. Beard raised some academic hackles early in this century by venturing his opinions on what the Founding Fathers really intended with his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution. It is allowable for a scholar to guess what other people have in mind, and a man of his caliber can get by with it, but I would prefer not to try.

It seems reasonable to assume we could establish what the authors intended by a careful reading of the Preamble, in which those authors put words in the mouth of "We, the people," listing six different reasons why the Constitution was ordained and established, on the assumption the people would in fact adopt their proposal -- an assumption some delegates strongly doubted.

But let me tell you about the Preamble: something you may already know.

The best evidence we have gives us good reason to believe that the Preamble was not only not written, nor even carefully considered and debated, by the fifty-five delegates, but worse yet that it was not even debated by all five members of the Committee on Style and Arrangements.

We know for sure it is one of the last things to come out of the Convention, and that it appeared on paper sometime during the second weekend of September in 1787 when the delegates were winding up their long effort and getting ready to go home.

It probably came from the pen of Gouverneur Morris, the Pennsylvania delegate who was sometimes spoken of by his colleagues as "the Tall Boy," and known by them for his charm, his wit and his wooden leg. And it may even have been written as an after thought on Tuesday. We know the Convention itself was still adjourned on Tuesday, September 11, the committee's report "not being made & being waited for," according to James Madison who was one of the four members working with Morris.

So the Preamble is not a particularly good source for an answer to the question: What did the authors intend?

There is a somewhat closely related matter, though, on which I stand ready to share some information that seems relevant to this conference of Georgists in this bicentennial year of the Constitution.

It may offer some insight into what at least one of those fifty-five delegates foresaw for these United States in years to come, and in years which have since come.

James Madison of Virginia, who was only 34 years old when he sat right in front of the Convention President at Philadelphia so he could hear everything that was said, and write it down, has since been called for good reason the Father of the Constitution. So he is perhaps as good an individual as any of the delegates to examine closely if we want a better understanding of what was in the Founding Fathers' minds.

We know from his own hand that he "was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day" from the Convention.

We know he was a natural "scholar," who had studied at Princeton during its early years. We know he had read all the books which were available on the broad subject of how governments might best be formed. He had assembled a library on "the history of natural law, political history, economics, and science, ancient and modern confederacies, and the social philosophy of the Enlightenment," in the words of Adrienne Koch, author of an introduction to Madison's Notes on the Convention. His fellow Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, who was in Paris as our Ambassador during the Convention, had helped him acquire some of the books.

So there can be no doubt whatsoever that James Madison was well acquainted with the works of John Locke, and of his Second Treatise on Civil Government.

Now, this is not the first paper on constitutional authorship which I have prepared for North American Georgists, but the second. The first was written eleven years ago for our 1976 meeting at Kendall College.

I claimed in the first paper -- and have found no reason since to regret having done so -- that key elements in the thinking which led the Constitutional authors to their proposal had come more than a century before from Locke, and in particular from his Second Treatise.

Locke's train of thought was something like this: Man, finding himself in a State of Nature as the new settlers might be doing in North America, would at first enjoy a more perfect liberty; but the nature of mankind and its circumstances being what it is, they would find it to their advantage -- and a better protection of their natural rights -- to form a government somewhat different from anything that had been known in the Old Country. They would find, as time went on, they needed protection not just from the king but from each other.

He advised a social compact, drawn up jointly and agreed upon, even if it meant giving up some measure of those natural rights: life, liberty and property.

The United States Constitution of 1787 was not the first attempt many of the Founding Fathers, including Madison, had made on the strength of Locke's advice. Most of those at Philadelphia had been involved in the writing of state constitutions along similar lines. And in some of them, Virginia's for example, those three rights -- life, liberty and property -- are more clearly spelled out.

So it is virtually certain Madison knew all this about John Locke.

Coincidentally, those pioneering efforts at constitutional authorship were made during the early eleven-year period which are the equivalent of the time which passed between my first paper on constitutions for Georgists and this second one.

And nothing I have discovered during the current interval leads me to regret having argued that none of the Constitutions, whether state or federal, was perfect. They have proven more successful in protecting life than in protecting liberty, and more successful on behalf of liberty than in the area of property. The Founding Fathers, in fact, made major compromises even with their better judgement, on liberty and property in the interest of getting anything at all.

But there has been a continuing effort to make things better.

It was suggested in my earlier paper that "America's major struggle through the past 200 years has centered around that second 'natural' right, and the first of the two great constitutional compromises: Liberty."

We fought a civil war to end slavery and to move black Americans up from only three-fifths of a human being to full designation. And we struggled for another whole century to move them up to full citizenship.

We have given women the right to vote and a steadily improving place in legal standing.

So we have done reasonably well with liberty.

The same cannot be said, however, on property, suggested in that first paper as the constitutional guarantee most closely linked with the Georgist concept.

And nothing I have discovered in the past eleven years leads me to regret having closed that earlier paper as follows: "It has taken us nearly two centuries to repair one original defect in our constitutions. Henry George has given us the ingenuity with which to repair the other. I see nothing discouraging in the fact that the job remains to be done."

One great difficulty here is the fact that Henry George has little to say in his written works on the constitutions, on their role in human affairs, or on John Locke.

Progress and Poverty contains only one reference to constitutions. It appears in a footnote (on page 542) which observes simply that the Constitution of the State of California was less successful than the much earlier Constitution of the United States.

He has a great deal to say, however, about liberty and he does of the Declaration of Independence, with its reference to life, and "the pursuit of happiness."

But it is my strong belief that George has given us exactly what is needed to deal with a long-term concern Madison wrestled with at Philadelphia, through his presidency two decades later, and right up until his death in 1836 without having mastered it. Madison knew very well that our federal Constitution was inadequate in the long run to deal with property rights, and that it might eventually have to give way to something else, but try as he would he could not come up with the answer.

It is my contention that, constitutionally speaking, George has cut the Gordian knot.

Now, I am not forgetting Madison, and the danger for America he foresaw, but let us first go back to John Locke for a better understanding of that "knot" and how it fits into these comments.

John Locke was not the sole source of inspiration for the Founding Fathers, as a great many scholars have pointed out. His books were not the only ones in Madison's library. But he was so deeply ingrained in constitutional thinking of two centuries ago that he should not be ignored.

Karen I. Vaughn dealt comprehensively with his role in helping shape the Founding Fathers intent in a bibliographical essay called "John Locke's Theory of Property: Problems of Interpretation" in the Spring 1980 volume of Literature of Liberty.

"The very reason, then, that men form societies and governments," she argues early on, "is to protect their property which Locke takes to include life, liberty and estate."

Now, parenthentically here, just long enough to put in a bookmark: The looseness with which Vaughn uses the word "property" is near the very heart of the trouble Madison had, and that a great many other good minds have since had with the concept.

We will be coming back to this point.

Vaughn identified Locke's theory of property as "one of the most debated and controversial areas of (his) political philosophy." She praises Martin Seliger, whose work she considers "the most comprehensive treatment of Locke's political theory in the literature today," for also seeing that theory of property as "the linchpin of Locke's political thought." So she pays it close attention in her careful essay.

Georgists will find the theory familiar. Commonly called the labor theory of property now, it is to be found in Progress and Poverty. An individual's right to property stems from his natural right to himself, as George argues again. Thus whatever a man, using his own labor, takes from the land and shapes into a thing of value becomes his property.

From the Second Treatise: "He that gathered a hundred bushels of acorns or apples, had thereby a property in them; they were his goods as soon as gathered."

But how about property in land? Nothing a man can do will bring land into existence. Well, Locke sees the difficulty, but has an answer: "Labour being the unquestionable pr9perty of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to …"

So when a man improves a tract of land -- mixes his labor with it -- he can be said to own it, and it becomes his property.

But, as Vaughn makes clear, Locke sets two limits on the acquisition of property out of nature and, while they are different (being limits on two different classes of property), they are both founded on a just concern for the human race as a whole.

The land with which the owner's labor is to be mixed can become his property through his labor, "at least where there is enough and as good left in common for others."

And the acorns, apples and even venison which have been gathered can become his property by the very act of gathering with only one qualification. As much property "as anyone can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils; so much he may by his labour fix a property in."

Each of these limits is a "proviso," the one dealing with land, the other with what is taken from the land and may be removed. Georgists know them to be fundamentally different: land and improvements.

Vaughn, with an all too typical looseness in the use of terms, fails to note that distinction. She spends little time with the proviso on land, arguing that "Locke does not stress this limitation, but puts most of the force of the limitation on property on his next argument": that regarding improvements.

And of course there is an easy answer to spoilage: Money. Gather all you want, but sell it fresh.

Locke, in his chapter on property, gets immediately to money, which is the means whereby a man can use to the "advantage of life," by selling to someone else for a price those acorns or venison which might otherwise spoil.

And how about that other proviso, the one which limits a man's right to land to those circumstances (rare today) in which "there is enough and as good left in common for others?"

Vaughn simply ignores it, possibly because there is so little to be found in the literature concerning it, her essay being by definition "bibliographical."

She sees the difference in the ways the word property may be used, and in fact faults C. B. MacPherson for taking "a very narrow view of the meaning of property."

MacPherson, she points out, "consistently interprets him to mean solely estate, and landed estate at that."

And, as we have seen, land is the narrow form of property for which the "Lockean proviso" -- as it has come to be called -- can not be explained away simply with money.

Thus the Lockean proviso, the real one, goes unanswered, except by those willing to use the word "property" loosely.

Little wonder. "Enough land, and as good" is a difficult to measure. Land, as anyone who deals with it comes to learn, almost infinite in its range of values: less than infinite only because there is a finite supply of land. Can Locke's labor theory of property in land justify my mixing labor with and thereby owning the most valuable corner in any particular community when there cannot be another site "as good?"

The deeper one digs into this matter of disparity in the ownership of land the more troublesome -- in terms of a stable form of government -- one finds it to be.

Madison was clearly aware of it at Philadelphia. He took the floor of the Convention on Tuesday, August 7, to talk about the danger, and to warn his colleagues that "in future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of property."

All too few of the delegates at Philadelphia had reason to be concerned with the Lockean proviso, as was discussed in my earlier paper on the constitutions. Many of the delegates were speculators, and proud of it. There was surely "enough" land left on the continent, certainly land that was "as good" as anything which had yet been claimed, probably some that was even better.

But Madison knew what would inevitably happen. The free land would eventually by taken up. There would be some people left without land -- a proletariat -- and it presented a danger for the "more perfect Union" the delegates were trying to put together.

Madison thought at Philadelphia the answer might lay in the question of suffrage.

"These (people without property) will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands: or which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence & ambition, in which case there will be equal danger on the other side," he argued 200 years ago this coming August 7.

But there were other things to be considered at Philadelphia in this question of suffrage, including the balance between state governments and the new government of the United States.

The practical question he had in mind was whether or not suffrage should be granted only to freeholders, as was the case in several of the states. It depended, he thought, on the feelings in those states "where the right was now exercised by every description of people."

He saw the advantages of limiting the vote to property owners. "Viewing the subject in its merits alone, the freeholders of the Country would be the safest depositories of Republican liberty." But that would, as time went on, disenfranchise more and more people. And "a gradual abridgement of this right has been the mode in which Aristocracies have been built on the ruins of popular forms."

Doctor Franklin answered immediately: "It is of great consequence that we should not depress the virtue & public spirit of our common people; of which they displayed a great deal during the war."

This struggle Madison foresaw between those who owned land and those who did not is, of course, one of the great common threads of American history. Jefferson wanted land ownership to be the basis of our society, but he saw that government would then have a responsibility to see that every family owned land. Where vacant land and poverty existed together, he knew, the natural right of all men to own land was out of adjustment.

The Louisiana Purchase helped, as did the gradual opening up of the continent, but even in his presidency Madison knew that the amount of free land was finite.

Horace Greeley's advice to "go west, young man," George Henry Evans's claims in the Workingman's Advocate that land monopoly were the root cause of poverty and inequality, George Washington Julian's fight for the Homestead Act, the railroad grants, the post-Civil war calls for "forty acres and a mule", and Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, the early statements of which were based in no small part of the writings of Henry George: all of these elements are facets of the ongoing struggle Madison foresaw.

And then, in 1829, when Madison was back home at Montpellier, and his state of Virginia was examining once again its own Constitution, the aging statesman wrote some notes which take up nine pages of the Letters of Madison, published in 1865.

"The United States have not reached the stage of society in which conflicting feelings of the class with, and the class without property, have the operation natural to them in countries fully peopled," he realized. The continent had not yet been filled up. But it must inevitably happen.

"And whenever the majority shall be without landed or other equivalent property, and without the means or hopes of acquiring it, what is to secure the rights of property against the danger of an equality and universality of suffrage, vesting complete power over property in hands without a share in it; not to speak of danger in the mean time from a dependence of an increasing number on the wealth of a few?"

When would we come to that dangerous time?

"It is a law of nature, now well understood, that the earth under a civilized cultivation is capable of yielding subsistence for a large surplus of consumers beyond those having an immediate interest in the soil," Madison wrote in 1829.

"And it is a lot of humanity, that of this surplus a large proportion is necessarily reduced by a competition for employment to wages which afford them the bare necessities of life," he realized.

So Madison did some arithmetic.

And it led him to believe that by the year 1929 there would be some 192,000,000 people in these United States, by which time we would have filled up our land.

"These reflections suggest the expedience of such a modification of Government as would give security to the part of society having the most at stake and being most exposed to danger," he thought.

Madison still believed the answer might be found in suffrage -- in solving the imbalance in property through the vote. He had three possible ideas.

First, "confining the right of suffrage to freeholders and to such as hold an equivalent property." Not a very good idea, he thought, because it would violate the basic rule that those who are bound by the laws ought to have a voice in making them.

Second, "Confining the right of suffrage for one branch to the holder of property, and for the other branch to those without property." Not a very good idea, either, because it would lead to such contests as "those between the patricians and plebeians at Rome."

Third, "Confining the rights of electing one branch of the Legislature to freeholders, and admitting all others to a common right with holders of property in the other branch." There are arguments to be made for it, but the plan was tried in New York and "has been abandoned. It is still on trial in North Carolina."

History has done little for Madison's hopes the answer to land imbalance would be found in suffrage. Extending the vote to women and to blacks has strengthened liberty but has done little for property. Instead we have a welfare system designed to "level" the acorns and the apples without regard for whose labor goes into the gathering.

Madison's arithmetic was not quite right, either. It was not until the sixties that our population topped 190,000,000.

But he was right in a larger sense. He was correct in his concerns. Roy Robbins says in Our Landed Heritage: "The fact is that much of the history of the national land system centers around the struggle between those two forces of squatterism and speculation, between the poor man and the man of wealth."

It was well before 1929 that others in America began to be deeply concerned over the danger Madison had foreseen a century before. Frederick Jackson Turner was a little-known professor of history from Wisconsin in 1893 when he made a speech at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago which eventually made him famous. Turner's frontier thesis, explaining the American character in terms of the availability of free land, was a dominant idea among this country's historians for several decades.

What Turner said at Chicago was that the continent had already been filled up. He had been studying the federal census returns for 1890 and had noted that, for the first time, the census bureau had seen fit to omit the "frontier" as a category. It did not exist anymore, as far as the census takers were concerned, and it troubled this historian because he felt sure the American character would change.

Franklin D. Roosevelt thought so too, in 1932, when speaking to the Commonwealth Club he said: "Our last frontier has long since been reached. There is no safety valve in the form of a Western Prairie …"

George Gilder was still saying it only a few years ago when he published his best-selling book, Wealth and Poverty. He writes, two pages from the end of the book, "It is said we must abandon economic freedom because our frontier is closed."

Note, if you will, that it is not just the right to property is coming into the picture as being threatened, but the right to liberty as well.

Turner himself, having thought long and hard about it for years and years, was specific about the threat to liberty after World War I when he was asked to deliver a series of six lectures on liberty at Harvard.

He said flatly that, once the continent had been filled up and all the free land was gone, there would be no longer any hope of the unrestrained economic liberty with which Madison had been familiar. In its place, he predicted, must come an "adjusted liberty" as government controls were extended in the interests of society as a whole.

The public domain was closed in 1936, and the "welfare state" came into existence.

Which brings us back to John Locke's plan for a social compact which would be the best guarantee of life, liberty and property, with its Lockean proviso I have likened to the Gordian knot.

Is there a way to unravel it?

Perhaps not, but as you will remember Alexander did not unravel the Gordian knot as others had tried to do. He cut it with a sword.

And at the risk of trying your patience, let me turn to one more aspect of this business of writing constitution's which I have suggested is unfinished business. It was John Dickenson of Delaware, during the Convention of Philadelphia 200 years ago, who voiced a theme which Madison and his colleagues followed: "Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us."

There is much to be said for experience, and it has served us well, but Homo sapiens has not gotten where he is on the strength of experience alone. It never could have gotten us to the moon.

Henry George's essential characteristic, in my opinion, was an incisive mind.

It was my good fortune in 1981 to be asked to write the preface to the current edition of The Science of Political Economy when it was republished by the Robert Schalkenbach Foundation.

The pages of that book "literally teem," I felt compelled to say, "with evidence that George (during the seven years in which he shaped it) was probing an area now known as General Semantics. He searches for meanings."

He reasons.

The Founding Fathers were uncomfortable with the tendency to reason, which they thought might mislead them, and in their day they had no experience to guide them in this matter of the Lockean proviso. But now we have the advantages of both. We know full well what happens to the liberty and the property of a people when all the land has been taken up and there is no longer "enough and as good" left for a great many. We see it happening around us.

Which brings us back to the parenthetical observation early in this paper on the careless use of words, tossed in as a bookmark to lead us back.

Language is the principal tool with which we reason. Language is the filing system by which we organize, hold and call back the ideas we build reflectively on the basis of what our senses perceive. Any looseness in the use of language is bound to confound the process of reason, since it leads to the calling back of ideas which do not belong where we put them when we misuse words.

It would be pointless here to deal with Karen Vaughn's careless use of the word "property," and unnecessary even to carp with Madison, who says in his notes on suffrage as quoted above, "and whenever the majority shall be without landed or other equivalent property. . ." What other equivalent property can there be? And where can the "means or hope of acquiring" property come from without the availability of land?

The essential point is that George did get into semantics and he did insist upon the accurate use of words.

He used 27 pages of The Science of Political Economy for instance, just to clear up the rampant misuse of the word "wealth" which is so near the heart of this continuing failure to understand economics.

He used 15 pages later in that fundamental study to deal with the misuse of this very word that is central to the John Locke and the Lockean proviso: "property."

George looks closely at the works of John Stuart Mill, a man for whom he clearly had respect, finding in them "what is in reality, though doubtless unconsciously to him, a juggle with words."

Mills, in one particular instance, "slips from one to the other of these two senses of the word land, not merely in the same connection, but in the same sentence, and even as between the noun and its pronoun without notice to the reader and seemingly without consciousness on his own part."

People do it all the time. Madison did it. Karen Vaughn did it. Everyone and his brother does it with the word "property," which has almost as many different meanings as the sky has stars.

Property in improvements in one thing, and money makes possible the fair exchange of ft before the acorns and the apples can spoil.

But property in land is another, and the people of these United States will continue to struggle hopelessly with the Lockean proviso and the steadily debilitating effects of its violation until such time as they see and accept how neatly Henry George's incisive mind has sliced through it.

And, appropriately, he found the way to cut the knot by the accurate use of a word, and a four-letter word at that.

David Ricardo came up with the definition of "rent." It is the margin of productivity by which any given piece of land exceeds the least productive in use. It is therefore the exact and accurate measure of whether or not the piece of land a man makes his property by mixing his labor with is "as good" as that which is left. So:

"It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent."

Hold back for society the economic rent of land -- the market's measure of just exactly how "good" the land is -- and Locke's provision will have been satisfied. Private property in land, being essential to the social compact as Locke conceived it and as the Founding Fathers wrote it, should and must remain. But we see now, or at least some of us see, that private property in land is not the problem even with a population as large as ours. The problem is private property in economic rent.

Turner's concern and Madison's before him that there is no longer "enough" land left, whether or not it be "as good," is valid, but the whole structure changes when there is private property in land but not in rent. There is still "enough" land in existence for all our needs to be met.

Locke never said that everyone, under his social compact, had to mix his labor with land and thereby make it his property, anymore than he said everyone had to go out and pick up the acorns and the apples. Money made it possible to exchange goods before they spoil, and money makes it possible to separate out the economic rent from property in land.

Now all we have to do is get it into the Constitution. It is as simple as that.