le a correct standard which may discriminate between equitable rule
and the most direct tyranny. For if we can once prevail upon ourselves
to depart from the strictness and integrity of this principle in favor
even of a considerable party, the argument will hold for one that is
less so; and thus we shall go on, narrowing the bottom of public right,
until step by step we arrive, though after no very long or very forced
deduction, at what one of our poets calls the _enormous faith_,--the
faith of the many, created for the advantage of a single person. I
cannot see a glimmering of distinction to evade it; nor is it possible
to allege any reason for the proscription of so large a part of the
kingdom, which would not hold equally to support, under parallel
circumstances, the proscription of the whole.

I am sensible that these principles, in their abstract light, will not
be very strenuously opposed. Reason is never inconvenient, but when it
comes to be applied. Mere general truths interfere very little with the
passions. They can, until they are roused by a troublesome application,
rest in great tranquillity, side by side with tempers and proceedings
the most directly opposite to them. Men want to be reminded, who do not
want to be taught; because those original ideas of rectitude, to which
the mind is compelled to assent when they are proposed, are not always
as present to it as they ought to be. When people are gone, if not into
a denial, at least into a sort of oblivion of those ideas, when they
know them only as barren speculations, and not as practical motives for
conduct, it will be proper to press, as well as to offer them to the
understanding; and when one is attacked by prejudices which aim to
intrude themselves into the place of law, what is left for us but to
vouch and call to warranty those principles 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