Quotation of the Day…

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… is from pages 15-16 of David Hume’s 1742 essay “That Politics May Be Reduced to a Science,” as this essay appears in the 1985 Liberty Fund collection of Hume’s essays, edited by the late Eugene Miller, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary):

But here it may be proper to make a distinction. All absolute governments must very much depend on the administration; and this is one of the great inconveniences attending that form of government. But a republican and free government would be an obvious absurdity, if the particular checks and controuls, provided by the constitution, had really no influence, and made it not the interest, even of bad men, to act for the public good. Such is the intention of these forms of government, and such is their real effect, where they are wisely constituted.

DBx: What has become, in today’s United States, of “the particular checks and controuls” provided by the U.S. Constitution?