“No Romance could be more amusing,” he chided Jefferson, than his belief that the United States would prove the exception to the dominant pattern of economic inequality throughout recorded history, as if human nature itself had been magically transformed in the migration from Europe to America. “After all,” he observed, “as long as Property exists, it will accumulate in Individuals and Families….I repeat, so long as the Idea and existence of PROPERTY is admitted and established in Society, accumulations of it will be made, the Snow ball will grow as it rolls.”
