The latest declaration was in 1826, the year of his death. It is in a paper containing some of his most intimate opinions. Here he bears testimony to “_equality_ among our citizens” as “essential to the maintenance of republican government.”[132] These are among his dying words. * * * * * Madison was colder in nature than Jefferson; but they were associates in opinion, as in political life. In the debates on the National Constitution the former condemned the denial of rights on account of color:-- “We have seen the mere distinction of color made, in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.”[133] Speaking directly of the right of suffrage, he uses the following language:-- “_The right of suffrage is certainly one of the fundamental articles of republican government_, and ought not to be left to be regulated by the legislature. A gradual abridgment of this right has been the mode in which _aristocracies_ have been built on the ruins of popular forms.”[134] Thus declaring himself against “aristocracies,” he naturally recognized the true idea; and here he was perplexed by the question of a property qualification, and the effort to reconcile it with “the right of suffrage,” which he calls “a fundamental article in republican constitutions.”[135] In another place, he says of “confining the right of suffrage to freeholders”: “It violates _the vital principle_ of free government, that those who are to be bound by laws ought to have a voice in making them; and the violation would be more strikingly unjust as the lawmakers become the minority.”[136] Completely recognizing the great American principle, that just government can stand only on “the consent of the governed,” he is brought to this conclusion:-- “Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the mass of citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them.”[137] In one of the most remarkable chapters of the “Federalist,” Madison gives expansion to this idea in his formal definition of a Republic:--