Legislation, as it has been usually understood, is not an affair of human competence. Immutable reason is the true legislator, and her decrees it behoves us to investigate. This is not true, in matters the most purely individual, unless in the limited sense already explained. The same distinction is to be made upon the subject of political authority.
All government is, strictly speaking, executive.
To the public support of justice therefore the authority of the community extends. Sterne's Sermons - Of a Good Conscience . To Book III, Chapter V1.