| 60 settlements and none to interfere with them. It is a Territory in which slavery is prohibited, and it is settled entirely with emigrants from the North and East.
"'The religious tenets of this people are so different from the present churches of the age that they always have and always will excite deep prejudices against them in any populous country where they may locate. We therefore, in a spirit of frank and friendly kindness, do advise them to seek a home where they may obtain large and separate bodies of land and have a community of their own.
"'We further say to them, if they regard their own safety and welfare, if they regard the welfare of their families, their wives and children, they will ponder with deep and solemn reflection on this friendly admonition. If they have one spark of gratitude, they will not willingly plunge a people into civil war who held out to them the friendly hand of assistance in that hour of dark distress when there was few to say, God save them. We can only say to them that if they still persist in the blind course they have heretofore followed in flooding the country with their people, that we fear and firmly believe that an immediate civil war is the inevitable consequence.
"'We know that there is not one among us who thirsts for the blood of that people. We do not contend that we have the least right, under the Constitution and laws of the country, to expel them by force; but we would indeed be blind if we did not foresee that the first blow that is struck at this moment of deep excitement, must and will speedily involve every individual in a war bearing ruin, woe, and desolation in its course. It matters but little how, where, or by whom the war may begin, when the work of destruction commences, we must all be borne onward by the storm or crushed beneath its fury. In a civil war, when our homes is the theatre [theater] on which it is fought, there can be no neutrals; let our opinions be what they may, we must fight in self-defense. We want nothing, we ask nothing, we would have nothing from this people. We only ask them, for their own safety and for ours, to take the least of the two evils. Most of them are destitute of land, have but little
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