James Norman Hall, in this book The Forgotten One and other true tales of the South Seas, gives the epistles of Robert Dean Frisbie under the title Frisbie of Danger Island.

Frisbie wrote to Hall from Suvarrow Island on 30 January 1942 and said: ‘You know how government immorality has corrupted private morality everywhere in the world this past generation and longer. Consider any government you please, although France is, probably, the most corrupt of the lot: they repudiate their debts internationally as well as those owing to their own people. They make
sacred promises which they have no intention of fulfilling. I firmly believe that governments everywhere are largely to blame for
the deplorable state of private morality existing in the world today. When governments are such crooks, how can they expect their
nationals to be models of virtue?’

Frisbie is, I think, mistaken; it is government that reflects the morals of the people because it is the people who produce the
persons that comprise the government; and it is the competition of the electoral process that selects the most shameless and
corrupt individuals from the body politic; worse, these chosen few are the ones who lust after power and prestige, who are by
default unfit to serve the nation because they only care about themselves and their further aggrandizement. Now, I have made a
sweeping generalization, which, in the end, becomes true because power tends to corrupt, in time turning the virtuous public
servant into the depraved political monster. Only when a nation is more moral than immoral, when the people are more engaged in
democracy than not, can it keep its leaders in check.