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But don't get into a passion: to see our statesmen trying their

nostrums, and fancying that they can cut off at a blow the

Hydra-like rogueries of mankind, is as good as a play. Minute

enactments are superfluous in good states, and are useless in bad

ones.

And now what remains of the work of legislation? Nothing for us;

but to Apollo the god of Delphi we leave the ordering of the

greatest of all things-that is to say, religion. Only our

ancestral deity sitting upon the centre and navel of the earth

will be trusted by us if we have any sense, in an affair of such

magnitude. No foreign god shall be supreme in our realms...