The nature or essence of government is to govern.A government that does not govern, is simply no government at all.If it has not the ability to govern and governs not, it may be an agency, an instrument in the bands of individuals for advancing their private interests, but it is not government.To be government it must govern both individuals and the community.If it is a mere machine for making prevail the will of one man, of a certain number of men, or even of the community, it may be very effective sometimes for good, sometimes for evil, oftenest for evil, but government in the proper sense of the word it is not.To govern is to direct, control, restrain, as the pilot controls and directs his ship.It necessarily implies two terms, governor and governed, and a real distinction between them.The denial of all real distinction between governor and governed is an error in politics analogous to that in philosophy or theology of denying all real distinction between creator and creature, God and the universe, which all the world knows is either pantheism or pure atheism--the supreme sophism.If we make governor and governed one and the same, we efface both terms; for there is no governor nor governed, if the will that governs is identically the will that is governed.To make the controller and the controlled the same is precisely to deny all control.There must, then, if there is government at all, be a power, force, or will that governs, distinct from that which is governed.In those governments in which it is held that the people govern, the people governing do and must act in a diverse relation from the people governed, or there is no real government.
Government is not only that which governs, but that which has the right or authority to govern.Power without right is not government.Governments have the right to use force at need, but might does not make right, and not every power wielding the physical force of a nation is to be regarded as its rightful government.Whatever resort to physical force it may be obliged to make, either in defence of its authority or of the rights of the nation, the government itself lies in the moral order, and politics is simply a branch of ethics--that branch which treats of the rights and duties of men in their public relations, as distinguished from their rights and duties in their private relations.
