Considerations of this kind, rather than any dread of his subjects, may probably have suggested the custom which prohibits an Emperor of China from making his person too familiar to the multitude, and which requires that he should exhibit himself only on particular occasions, arrayed in pomp and magnificence, and at the head of his whole court, consisting of an assemblage of many thousand officers of state, the agents of his will, all ready, at the word of command, to prostrate themselves at his feet. The power of the sovereign is absolute; but the patriarchal system, making it a point of indispensable duty for a son to bring offerings to the spirit of his deceased parent in the most public manner, operates as some check upon the exercise of this power. By this civil institution, the duties of which are observed with more than a religious strictness, he is constantly put in mind that the memory of his private conduct, as well as of his public acts, will long survive his natural life; that his name will, at certain times in every year, be pronounced with a kind of sacred and reverential awe, from one extremity of the extensive empire to the other, provided he may have filled his station to the satisfaction of his subjects; and that, on the contrary, public execrations will rescue from oblivion any arbitrary act of injustice and oppression, of which he may have been guilty. It may also operate as a motive for being nice and circumspect in the nomination of a successor, which the law has left entirely to his choice.