| 346 can be freed, and, until by legislative acts she makes redress-Missouri is degraced!
"It seems like some horrid dream, that these enormities, which Nicholas would have shrunk from inflicting on the Poles, have been deliberately committed in an age of peace, in a land of laws and freedom, upon our own brethren. 5 Is it actually true that citizens-peaceable, industrious, temperate, orderly citizens-have been driven from their property, their houses burned, the furniture broken and scattered, their crops laid waste, their stores plundered, their cattle killed, their horses stolen, their clothes stripped from them, and themselves expelled under threats of instant death? Is it true that men have been tarred and feathered, whipped till they were raw from head to foot, till their bowels gushed out, that their skulls have been knocked in, and brains scattered with musket butts, that they have been shot down while crying for quarter, shot down unarmed and defenseless like hogs in a pen? Is it true that sick women have been driven from burning houses at midnight on the snowy prairies, where they have given birth to children on the frozen ground, that they have forded rivers with helpless infants in their arms, fleeing from heartless pursuers, that they have been insulted when their natural protectors were hid from the murderers, that they have been violated by the guards appointed for their defense? And were the guilty instigators and executioners of the massacres, arsons, and rapes, really men of standing, ministers of the gospel, judges, senators, military officers, and the Governor of the State? Were not the evidence on which the narrative of each one of these cruelties rests incontrovertible, no one could conceive that such fiendlike acts had actually been wrought by beings in human shape. Would that for the honor of our nature they could be discredited. Our statement is strictly, unexaggeratedly true. It is only TOO MEAGER, TOO FEEBLE. . . .
"These, it may be said, were the acts of unauthorized mobs, against whom the militia of the State had been called
5 This was not a Mormon paper, and the word brethren was not used in the sense of church fellowship.
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