| 70 persecuted people from further violence and destruction?
"It is said that our friends are poor; that they have but little or nothing to bind their feelings or wishes to Clay County, and that in consequence have a less claim upon that county. We do not deny the fact that our friends are poor; but their persecutions have helped to render them so. While other men were peacefully following their avocations and extending their interest, they have been deprived of the right of citizenship, prevented from enjoying their own, charged with violating the sacred principles of our constitution and laws, made to feel the keenest aspersions of the tongue of slander, waded through all but death, and are now suffering under calumnies calculated to excite the indignation and hatred of every people among whom they may dwell, thereby exposing them to destruction and inevitable ruin!
"If a people, a community, or a society can accumulate wealth, increase in worldly fortune, improve in science and arts, rise to eminence in the eyes of the public, surmount these difficulties so much as to bid defiance to poverty and wretchedness, it must be a new creation, a race of beings superhuman. But in all their poverty and want we have yet to learn for the first time that our friends are not industrious and temperate, and wherein they have not always been the last to retaliate or resent an injury, and the first to overlook and forgive. We do not urge that there are not exceptions to be found. All communities, all societies and associations are cumbered with disorderly and less virtuous members-members who violate in a greater or less degree the principles of the same; but this can be no just criterion by which to judge a whole society. And further still, where a people are laboring under constant fear of being dispossessed, very little inducement is held out to excite them to be industrious.
"We think, gentlemen, that we have pursued this subject far enough, and we here express to you, as we have in a letter accompanying this to our friends, our decided disapprobation to the idea of shedding blood if any other course can be followed to avoid it; in which case, and which alone, we have urged upon our friends to desist, only in extreme cases
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