But then Mason, Wilson, and John Adams, no less than Jefferson, were, as they all appreciated, drawing on long familiarity with the seminal works of the English and Scottish writers John Locke, David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, or such English poets as Defoe (“When kings the sword of justice first lay down, / They are no kings, though they possess the crown. / Titles are shadows, crowns are empty things, / The good of subjects is the end of kings”). Or, for that matter, Cicero. (“The people’s good is the highest law.”)
