Liberty, as the framers of the Constitution understood the term, had to do primarily with property and property rights. The chief danger which they saw in the Revolutionary state governments was the opportunity afforded to the majority to legislate upon matters which the well-to-do classes wished to place beyond the reach of popular interference. The unlimited authority which the state government had over taxation and its power to restrict or abridge property rights were viewed with alarm by the wealthy classes, who felt that any considerable measure of democracy would be likely to deprive them of their time-honored prerogatives. To guard against this danger the Constitution sought, in the interest of the classes which dominated the Federal Convention, to give the widest possible scope to private property. It prohibited private property in nothing--permitting it, as originally adopted, even in human beings. It may be said without exaggeration that the American scheme of government was planned and set up to perpetuate the ascendency of the property-holding class in a society leavened with democratic ideas. Those who framed it were fully alive to the fact that their economic advantages could be retained only by maintaining their class ascendency in the government. They understood the economic significance of democracy. They realized that if the supremacy of the majority were once fully established the entire policy of the government would be profoundly changed. They foresaw that it would mean the abolition of all private monopoly and the abridgment and regulation of property rights in the interest of the general public. The Constitution was in form a political document, but its significance was mainly economic. It was the outcome of an organized movement on the part of a class to surround themselves with legal and constitutional guarantees which would check the tendency toward democratic legislation. These were made effective through the attitude of the United States courts which, as Professor Burgess says, "have never declined jurisdiction where private property was immediately affected on the ground that the question was political."[177] "There can be no question that the national government has given to the minority a greater protection than it has enjoyed anywhere else in the world, save in those countries where the minority is a specially privileged aristocracy and the right of suffrage is limited. So absolute have property rights been held by the Supreme Court, that it even, by the Dred Scott decision, in effect made the whole country a land of slavery, because the slave was property, and the rights of property were sacred."[178]