“When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.”
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Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong.
I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.
Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
