Abstract
When Benjamin Franklin suggested that man is by nature a tool-making
animal, he summed up what was for his fellow Americans the common sense
of the matter. It is not, then, surprising that, when Britain's colonists
in North America broke with the mother country over the issue of an
unrepresentative parliament's right to tax and govern the colonies, they
defended their right to the property they owned on the ground that it was
in a most thorough-going sense an extension of themselves: the fruits of
their own labor. This understanding they learned from John Locke, who based
the argument of his Two Treatises of Government on the unorthodox account of
providence and of man's place within the natural world that Sir Francis
Bacon had been the first to articulate. All of this helps explain why the
framers of the American constitution included within it a clause giving
sanction to property in ideas of practical use.