of original justice from whence alone our title to everything valuable in society is derived?  Can it be thought to arise from a superfluous, vain parade of displaying general and uncontroverted maxims, that we should revert at this time to the first principles of law, when we have directly under our consideration a whole body of statutes, which, I say, are so many contradictions, which their advocates allow to be so many exceptions from those very principles?  Take them in the most favorable light, every exception from the original and fixed rule of equality and justice ought surely to be very well authorized in the reason of their deviation, and very rare in their use.  For, if they should grow to be frequent, in what would they differ from an abrogation of the rule itself?  By becoming thus frequent, they might even go further, and, establishing themselves into a principle, convert the rule into the exception.  It cannot be dissembled that this is not at all remote from the case before us, where the great body of the people are excluded from all valuable property,—­where the greatest and most ordinary benefits of society are conferred as privileges, and not enjoyed on the footing of common rights.

The clandestine manner in which those in power carry on such designs is a sufficient argument of the sense they inwardly entertain of the true nature of their proceedings.  Seldom is the title or preamble of the law of the same import with the body and enacting part; but they generally place some other color uppermost, which differs from that which is afterwards to appear, or at least one that is several shades fainter.  Thus, the penal laws in question are not called laws to oblige men baptized and educated in Popery to renounce their religion or their property, but are called laws to prevent the growth of Popery; as if their purpose was only to prevent conversions to that sect, and not to persecute a million of people already engaged in it.  But of all the instances of this sort of legislative artifice, and of the principles that produced it, I never met with any which made a stronger impression on me than that of Louis the Fourteenth, in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  That monarch had, when he made that revocation, as few measures to keep with public opinion as any man.  In the exercise of the most unresisted authority at home, in a career of uninterrupted victory abroad, and in a course of flattery equal to the circumstances of his greatness in both these particulars, he might be supposed to have as little need as disposition to render any sort of account to the world of his procedure towards his subjects.  But the persecution of so vast a body of men as the Huguenots was too strong a measure even for the law of pride and power.  It was too glaring a contradiction even to those principles upon which persecution itself is supported.  Shocked at the naked attempt, he had recourse, for a palliation of his conduct, to an unkingly denial of the fact which