| 343 The Boston Atlas published a letter showing the contrast between the Mormons and their neighbors. 4
4 FROM THE BOSTON ATLAS.-Letter from a Gentleman at the West to his friend in Boston.
Dear Sir:-You ask me for information concerning the Mormon trouble in Missouri. In giving it I shall be compelled to state particulars that will stagger your belief; and I shall be betrayed into a warmth of expression which may be construed into the signs of partisan bitterness but which will be in truth only the language of honest indignation. The series of wrongs and outrages perpetrated on the Mormons, and the closing act of injustice by which those wrongs and outrages were suffered to escape, not only unpunished but triumphant, from the elements of persecution, which in vain seeks a parallel in the history of our country. For example of similar outrages on the rights of justice and humanity, I am compelled to resort to barbarous nations and dark ages, which alone furnish precedents to excuse the conduct of the people of Missouri.
The Mormons, I need not say, are a weak and credulous people, whose chief fault is the misfortune of having become the dupes of a villainous impostor. * They have an excess of that as to which the world at large is exceedingly deficient, i. e., faith. They have been misled; and they are to be pitied. But I have yet to learn that their faith taught them immorality. I have yet to learn that it encouraged disobedience to the laws or encroachments on the rights of any fellow citizen.
The Mormons were in truth a moral, orderly, and sober population. They were industrious farmers and ingenious mechanics. They were busy about their own affairs, and never intermeddled in the concerns of their neighbors. They were exceedingly peaceful and averse to strife, quarrels, and violence. They had established schools, they encouraged education; and they all had the rudiments of learning, taught under our school system at the East. They had begun to open fine farms and put their lands in a high state of improvement. Many of them were surrounded by numerous comforts, and some with even the elegancies of life.
In all these respects their condition presented a broad contrast to that of their neighbors. Of these neighbors, many had been there for years-much longer in fact than the Mormons-and had made few advances upon the Indians they had displaced. Mud hovels, a "truck patch," hunting, and buckskin breeches were their highest aspirations. Letters they despised as much as they did the conveniences or comforts of life. Bold, violent, unscrupulous, and grasping-hating all who differed from, much more who excelled them in the art of living, the relations between them and the Mormons may readily be inferred by any man who has read a single chapter in the history of human strife.
The Anti-Mormons (for I must distinguish this horde of demi-savages) are exceedingly intolerant. They are refuse Kentuckians and Tennesseans, intermixed with Virginians of the same caste, in whom the vice of sectional pride, which marks these people, and a prejudice against all others, especially those belonging to the free States, whom they indiscriminately brand as Yankees-is exaggerated to the highest pitch. Such persons, if they could do it, would incorporate in the Constitution of Missouri a provision to prohibit emigrating thither of anybody not belonging to their own "kith and kin." They have also personal pride
* The writer, though just in other remarks, falls into the common error of crying imposition, without showing wherein the deception consists. *
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