nd fled across the frontier, rather than live
a daily lie to God by forswearing the religion of their conscience.
Others of this class, on whom religion sat more lightly, as the only
means of saving their property from confiscation, pretended to be
converted to Roman Catholicism; though, we shall find, that these "new
converts," as they were called, were treated with as much suspicion on
the one side as they were regarded with contempt on the other.

There were also the Huguenot manufacturers, merchants, and employers of
labour, of whom a large number closed their workshops and factories,
sold off their goods, converted everything into cash, at whatever
sacrifice, and fled across the frontier into Switzerland--either
settling there, or passing through it on their way to Germany, Holland,
or England.

It was necessary to stop this emigration, which was rapidly
diminishing the population, and steadily impoverishing the country. It
was indeed a terrible thing for Frenchmen, to tear themselves away
from their country--Frenchmen, who have always clung so close to
their soil that they have rarely been able to form colonies of
emigration elsewhere--it was breaking so many living fibres to leave
France, to quit the homes of their fathers, their firesides, their
kin, and their race. Yet, in a multitude of cases, they were compelled
to tear themselves by the roots out of the France they so loved.

Yet it was so very easy for them to remain. The King merely required
them to be "converted." He held that loyalty required them to be of
"his religion." On the 19th of October, 1685, the day after he had
signed the Act of Revocation, La Reynee, lieutenant of the police of
Paris, issued a notice to the Huguenot tradespeople and
working-classes, requiring them to be converted instantly. Many of
them were terrified, and conformed accordingly. Next day, another
notice was issued to the Huguenot bourgeois, requiring them to
assemble on the following day for the purpose of publicly making a
declaration of their conversion.

The result of those measures was to make hypocrites rather than
believers, and they took effect upon the weakest and least-principled
persons. The strongest, most independent, and high-minded of the
Huguenots, who would _not_ be hypocrites, resolved passively to resist
them, and if they could not be allowed to exercise freedom of
conscience in their own country, they determined to seek it elsewhere.
Hence the large in