"The whole body of the nation is the sovereign legislative, judiciary, and executive power for itself. The inconvenience of meeting to exercise these powers in person, and their inaptitude to exercise them, induce them to appoint special organs to declare their legislative will, to judge and to execute it. It is the will of the nation which makes the law obligatory; it is their will which creates or annihilates the organ which is to declare and announce it"The law being law because it is the will of the nation, is not changed by their changing the organ through which they choose to announce their future will; no more than the acts I have done by one attorney lose their obligation by my changing or discontinuing that attorney." (Letter to Edmund Randolph, 1799; The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition, Volume 10, Page 126; 1904)
Or, as James Madison made clear in The Federalist Papers No. 47 (January, 1788) there exists a need by humanity for government:
" What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
The dean of Science Fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, wrote in his book Starship Troopers (1959), that --government exists only as it is expressed by the morally responsible acts of individuals." Without acts which are made by the morally responsible--not self-serving--among those who are governing, what you have is not government, but an anarchic despotism.
John Updike's character The Statesman Buchanan, in Act I of his play Buchanan Dying, expresses succinctly the two results of governance by the morally responsible or irresponsible, "Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading."
Thomas Jefferson also wrote about and amplified this same guiding principle: "Is it the less dishonest to do what is wrong, because not expressly prohibited by written law? Let us hope our moral principles are not yet in that stage of degeneracy." (Letter to John Wayles Eppes, 1813. The Complete Writings of Thomas Jefferson; Memorial Edition: volume 13, page 360, 1904.)
In this, Heinlein, Updike, and Jefferson were writing about the deeper issues of governance first asserted by John Locke in his Second Treatise on Civil Government:
" Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man." (Emphasis added.)
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