Maggie's Farm

The American Constitution by Frederic Jesup Stimson Published 1908

An even greater side of the personal liberty right, more important at least today because more likely to be denied, is the right to labor and to trade; to acquire thereby property, to exercise one's faculties in any lawful way, to increase one's comfort and one's powers by the acquisition of wealth or the exercise of property rights. This right was recognized in the express words of Magna Charta (sic), where it says that “no free man of England shall be deprived of his freehold or of his liberties or of his free customs”; for this expression, under the law of the time, was understood to mean the right to labor at any trade, to earn one's living in any lawful manner; and the right to be protected in this from any hindrance of others, either physical or by contract in restraint of trade; from combinations of the Guilds, or from monopolies created by the State.