Politics & Power Quote by Robert Dale Owen

There is a cold, prosecutorial clarity to Owen's phrasing: "property" is treated less as a sacred right than as a potential weapon. The sentence turns a cornerstone of liberal democracy into a conditional privilege, a thing the state may revoke when it decides the public is at risk. That pivot is the point. Owen isn't arguing about morality in the abstract; he's laying down a governing principle for emergencies, one that quietly rearranges the hierarchy of rights so national security sits above ownership.

The subtext is a rebuttal to the American habit of equating property with freedom. By calling out property "in the hands of its citizens", Owen deliberately refuses the romantic image of the virtuous proprietor. Citizens can be threats; the nation can be fragile; the state can be justified in forcibly redistributing or confiscating assets when those assets function as infrastructure for harm. It's a sentence built to authorize action, not to win hearts.

Context matters because Owen lived through an era when the U.S. was fighting over the boundaries of federal power, slavery, and war. As a reform-minded politician with roots in utopian and abolitionist currents, he would have seen "property" not only as land and capital but as the legal architecture that could shield violence and destabilization. The line anticipates a modern logic we now recognize in sanctions, wartime seizures, and national security regulation: rights are real, but they are not allowed to become platforms for sabotage. The brilliance, and the danger, is how neatly "endangers" can expand to fit whatever a government fears.