Unfortunately, gentlemen, fiddling with the law brings nothing but trouble. That same door flung wide to honesty also served the cunning of a certain Nabiga, who connived with the Withdrawals Officer to get himself a seat on the assembly. There was one vacancy to be filled and three candidates; the officer selected the balls with his eyes fixed on his accomplice, who only stopped shaking his head when the ball in question was his own. That was all it took to put paid to the idea of a gauze bag. With exemplary patience, the assembly restored the thick fabric of the previous regime, but, to avoid any further ellipses, literary or otherwise, it decreed that balls with incorrect inscriptions could henceforth be validated if five persons swore an oath that the name inscribed was indeed that of the candidate in question.

This new statute gave rise to a new and unforeseen issue, as you will see. It concerned the election of a Donations Collector, a public servant charged with raising public revenue in the form of voluntary donations. Among the candidates were one called Caneca and another called Nebraska. The ball drawn from the bag was Nebraska’s. There was, however, a mistake, in that the last letter was missing, but five witnesses swore an oath in accordance with the law that the duly elected candidate was the republic’s one and only Nebraska. Everything seemed to be settled, until the candidate Caneca sought leave to prove that the name on the ball in question was not Nebraska’s, but his own. The justice of the peace granted the hearing. As this point, they summoned a great philologist—perhaps the greatest in the republic, as well as being a good metaphysician and a rather fine mathematician—who proved the matter as follows: