He learns that this nation supports at great cost a college of priests who know exactly the time when one should set sail and when one should give battle, by inspecting an ox's liver, or by the way in which the chickens eat barley. This sacred science was brought formerly to the Romans by a little god named Tages, who emerged from the earth in Tuscany. These peoples worship one supreme God whom they always call the very great and very good God. Nevertheless, they have built a temple to a courtesan named Flora; and almost all the good women of Rome have in their homes little household gods four or five inches high. One of these little divinities is the goddess of the breasts; the other the goddess of the buttocks. There is a household god who is called the god Pet. The emperor Yventi starts laughing: the tribunals of Nankin think first of all with him that the Roman ambassadors are madmen or impostors who have taken the title of envoys of the Roman Republic; but as the emperor is as just as he is polite, he has private talks with the ambassadors. He learns that the Roman pontiffs have been very ignorant, but that Caesar is now reforming the calendar; they admit to him that the college of augurs was established in early barbarous times; that this ridiculous institution, become dear to a people long uncivilized, has been allowed to subsist; that all honest people laugh at the augurs; that Caesar has never consulted them; that according to a very great man named Cato, never has an augur been able to speak to his comrade without laughter; and that finally Cicero, the greatest orator and the best philosopher in Rome, has just written against the augurs a little work entitled "Of Divination," in which he commits to eternal ridicule all the soothsayers, all the predictions, and all the sorcery of which the world is infatuated. The emperor of China is curious to read Cicero's book, the interpreters translate it; he admires the book and the Roman Republic. _DEMOCRACY_ Ordinarily there is no comparison between the crimes of the great who are always ambitious, and the crimes of the people who always want, and can want only liberty and equality. These two sentiments, Liberty and Equality, do not lead direct to calumny, rapine, assassination, poisoning, the devastation of one's neighbours' lands, etc.; but ambitious might and the mania for power plunge into all these crimes whatever be the time, whatever be the place. Popular government is in itself, therefore, less iniquitous, less abominable than despotic power. The great vice of democracy is certainly not tyranny and cruelty: there have been mountain-dwelling republicans, savage, ferocious; but it is not the republican spirit that made them so, it is nature. The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with many heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.