* * * * *

Let nothing be infamous save vice.

* * * * *

Let taxes be always proportional.

* * * * *

Let the law never be contradictory to custom: for if the custom be good,
the law is worthless.

_CLIMATE_

Climate influences religion as regards customs and ceremonies. A
legislator will not have had difficulty in making the Indians bathe in
the Ganges at certain seasons of the moon; it is a great pleasure for
them. He would have been stoned if he had proposed the same bath to the
peoples who dwell on the banks of the Dwina near Archangel. Forbid pig
to an Arab who would have leprosy if he ate of this flesh which is very
bad and disgusting in his country, he will obey you joyfully. Issue the
same veto to a Westphalian and he will be tempted to fight you.

Abstinence from wine is a good religious precept in Arabia where orange
water, lemon water, lime water are necessary to health. Mohammed would
not have forbidden wine in Switzerland perhaps, especially before going
to battle.

There are customs of pure fantasy. Why did the priests of Egypt imagine
circumcision? it is not for health. Cambyses who treated them as they
deserved, they and their bull Apis, Cambyses' courtiers, Cambyses'
soldiers, had not had their prepuces lopped, and were very well. Climate
does nothing to a priest's genitals. One offered one's prepuce to Isis,
probably as one presented everywhere the first fruits of the earth. It
was offering the first fruits of life.

Religions have always rolled on two pivots; observance and creed:
observance depends largely on climate; creed not at all. One could as
easily make a dogma accepted on the equator as the polar circle. It
would later be rejected equally at Batavia and in the Orkneys, while it
would be maintained _unguibus et rostro_ at Salamanca. That depends in
no way on the soil and the atmosphere, but solely on opinion, that
fickle queen of the world.

Certain libations of wine will be precept in a vine-growing country, and
it will not occur to a legislator's mind to institute in Norway sacred
mysteries which cannot be performed without wine.

It will be expressly ordered to burn incense in the parvis of a temple
where beasts are slaughtered in the Deity's honour, and for the priests'
supper. This butcher's shop called "temple" would be a place of
abominable infection if it were not conti