In the former case, therefore, as your law would be unnecessary, in the latter it would be persecuting: that is, it would put your penalty and his ideas of duty in the opposite scales; which is, or I know not what is, the precise idea of persecution.
Burke discusses the implications of laws that conflict with personal conscience, equating such laws with persecution.
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Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens.
In some people I see great liberty, indeed; in many, if not in the most, an oppressive, degrading servitude.
Whatever they are, I wish my countrymen rather to recommend to our neighbors the example of the British Constitution than to take models from them for the improvement of our own.
They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception.
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