h that the Edict of
Nantes was no longer necessary, as the object of it (the Protestants of
his kingdom) were then reduced to a very small number. The refugees in
Holland cried out against this misrepresentation. They asserted, I
believe with truth, that this revocation had driven two hundred thousand
of them out of their country, and that they could readily demonstrate
there still remained six hundred thousand Protestants in France. If this
were the fact, (as it was undoubtedly,) no argument of policy could have
been strong enough to excuse a measure by which eight hundred thousand
men were despoiled, at one stroke, of so many of their rights and
privileges. Louis the Fourteenth confessed, by this sort of apology,
that, if the number had been large, the revocation had been unjust. But,
after all, is it not most evident that this act of injustice, which let
loose on that monarch such a torrent of invective and reproach, and
which threw so dark a cloud over all the splendor of a most illustrious
reign, falls far short of the case in Ireland? The privileges which the
Protestants of that kingdom enjoyed antecedent to this revocation were
far greater than the Roman Catholics of Ireland ever aspired to under a
contrary establishment. The number of their sufferers, if considered
absolutely, is not half of ours; if considered relatively to the body of
each community, it is not perhaps a twentieth part. And then the
penalties and incapacities which grew from that revocation are not so
grievous in their nature, nor so certain in their execution, nor so
ruinous by a great deal to the civil prosperity of the state, as those
which we have established for a perpetual law in our unhappy country. It
cannot be thought to arise from affectation, that I call it so. What
other name can be given to a country which contains so many hundred
thousands of human creatures reduced to a state of the most abject
servitude?

In putting this parallel, I take it for granted that we can stand for
this short time very clear of our party distinctions. If it were enough,
by the use of an odious and unpopular word, to determine the question,
it would be no longer a subject of rational disquisition; since that
very prejudice which gives these odious names, and which is the party
charged for doing so, and for the consequences of it, would then become
the judge also. But I flatter myself that not a few will be found who do
not think that the names of Protest