that in order to succeed a courtier should have neither
honour nor character. As regards virtue, one must be prodigiously
virtuous to dare to say the truth. The virtuous man is much more at his
ease in a republic; he has no one to flatter."

"Do you think," said the man from Europe, "that laws and religions are
made for climates, just as one has to have furs in Moscow, and gauzy
stuffs in Delhi?"

"Without a doubt," answered the Brahmin. "All the laws which concern
material things are calculated for the meridian one lives in. A German
needs only one wife, and a Persian three or four.

"The rites of religion are of the same nature. How, if I were Christian,
should I say mass in my province where there is neither bread nor wine?
As regards dogmas, that is another matter; the climate has nothing to do
with them. Did not your religion begin in Asia, whence it was driven
out? does it not exist near the Baltic Sea, where it was unknown?"

"In what state, under what domination, would you like best to live?"
asked the councillor.

"Anywhere but where I do live," answered his companion. "And I have met
many Siamese, Tonkinese, Persians and Turks who said as much."

"But, once again," persisted the European, "what state would you
choose?"

The Brahmin answered: "The state where only the laws are obeyed."

"That is an old answer," said the councillor.

"It is none the worse for that," said the Brahmin.

"Where is that country?" asked the councillor.

"We must look for it," answered the Brahmin.

_SUPERSTITION_

The superstitious man is to the rogue what the slave is to the tyrant.
Further, the superstitious man is governed by the fanatic and becomes
fanatic. Superstition born in Paganism, adopted by Judaism, infested the
Christian Church from the earliest times. All the fathers of the Church,
without exception, believed in the power of magic. The Church always
condemned magic, but she always believed in it: she did not
excommunicate sorcerers as madmen who were mistaken, but as men who were
really in communication with the devil.

To-day one half of Europe thinks that the other half has long been and
still is superstitious. The Protestants regard the relics, the
indulgences, the mortifications, the prayers for the dead, the holy
water, and almost all the rites of the Roman Church, as a superstitious
dementia. Superstition, according to them, consists in taking useless
practices for necessary practices. Am