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 made against him. In the preamble,
therefore, to his Act of Revocation, he sets fort