Show MOKS10N UNITY AND TRIBUNE LOGIC We recently asserted that for Judge GOODWIK to ask Mormons to vote for him was to ask them virtually to vote to disfranchise dis-franchise themselves that t ask them to sustain the Liberal party was to ask them to lend aid and comfort to the enemies of their religion the libellers of their personal lives the perverters of their history the foes of their liberties To which the rejected candidate replied that the Mormon people had been united in Illinois aud in Missouri inferring that at least this unhappy sect had not been driven to unite by inhuman treatment in the cast And in reply to our assertion that Mormon property liberties and lives had been unjustly un-justly sacrified in the states named the organ of hatred and oppression replies that such treatment was the effect and not the cause ot Mormon unity That we deny I The casual student of Mormon history his-tory knows that the objections to the Mormon people upon their settling in Missouri were of that same visionary and untangible nature that they have been elsewhere and aro here It will not do for our contemporary to say that because Mormons were badly treated therefore they were bad and deserved de-served it The history of mankind is too full of unhappy instances of mans inhumanity inhu-manity to man for such a proposition to receive re-ceive a moments credence Even the history of free America is I tainted with records of mobs and tinted persecutions persecu-tions of men and people whoso course time tons te has since stamped with approval Such logic would be at variance with the experience of mankind it involves the proposition that persecution is always the I result of a just cause and would prove i what the Tribune says about Mormon treatment treat-ment of Gentiles in this territory were true that tho Gentiles have been a hard lot because persecuted a deduction from Tribune logic that would be quite as unwelcome un-welcome as it is inevitable We say that the persecution of Mormons in the cast had its inception in the minds of just such men as Judge GOODWIN of men who insist that other people shall bend their opinions and conduct to their standard who forget that the success of the revolution the assertion of the right of men to differ of the right of all t believe as they please and do as they please within the plain limitation that a person must not so use his own liberty as to encroach upon that of others that the laws make tho boundary lines of our rights and that so long as we do not violate them we must be protected pour p-our opinions and conduct however peculiar they may seem to our neighbors The Mormons had scarcely reached Missouri Mis-souri before it citizens began to hold mass meetings and to make resolutions against them Did the Missourians say they were I dishonest or lazy or unvirtuous or lawbreakers law-breakers in an way No the terrible indictment in-dictment they charged against their peaceable peace-able and industrious neighbors was that they were eastern men with manners > 4 habits customs and even dialect different from Missourians professing a fear that if the Saints were not interfered with the day would not be far distant when the civil government of the county would be in their hands when the officers would be Mormons or persons wishing t court their favor they asked with a great show of solemnity Tat would be the fate of our lives and property in the hands of jurors and witnesses wit-nesses who do not blush t declare and would not upon occasion hesitate t swear that they have wrought miracles and have been the subject of miraculous and supernatural super-natural cures have conversed with God and angels and possess and exercise the gifts of divination and unknown tongues and fred with the prospects of obtaining inheritances without money and without price may be better imagined than described Concerning the latter slander propagated by unscrupulous men who feared the political strength of the Saints it may be said that it was in vain that tho Mormons pointed to the fact that they had uniformly purchased their real estate that the Lord while expressing his determination determina-tion that the Saints should yet have Jackson Jack-son county as an inheritance commanded them to purchase the land Upon such an indictment the people of Jackson county resolved that the civil law did not afford them asuf ficient guarantee against threatening evils and they determined to get rid of the Mormons peacably if thoy could for cibl v if they must Governor Dunklin of w Missouri said Amore clear and indisputable indis-putable right does not exist than that the Mormon people who were expelled from their homes in Jackson county should return re-turn and live on their lands and i they cannot be persuaded to give up that right or to qualify it my course as the chief executive ex-ecutive of the state is a plain one The citizens of Clay county afterwards set forth in their enumeration of reasons I why the Mormons should leave the county the objection that their religious tenets are so different that deep prejudice would always result and Governor Dunklin in confirmation says I am fully persuaded that the eccentricity of the religious opinions opin-ions and prantices of the Mormons Is at tho bottom of the outrages committed upon them Governor FonD of Illinois says that the early settlers of Hancock county among whom the Mormons settled in Illinois were hard cases In Illinois as in Missouri Ilnois there was an almost total absence of Mor mon crimes and again reappears the nar rowminded hatred of despotic and sectarian secta-rian minds Governor FORD outlines the nature of Mormon persecution in Illinois when he says in his history of Illinois that Scattered through the country they might have lived in peace but they insisted on their right to congregate in one great city The people were determined that they should not exercise that right and the government was powerless against such combinations The evidence is irresistible that tho sole causes of the persecution of Mormons in their early years and the chief cause in their later years has been because they were exercising what they believed to be their inalienable privilege under our institutions insti-tutions of being peculiar and exclusive if they saw fit and that the Mormons were not driven robbed and murdered because they were in any true sense deserving of such treatment We therefore reassert that the only consistent con-sistent attitude for Mormons is to oppose a united front to those who seek to rob them of their liberties and that the fact that Mormons unite here and did unite in Missouri Mis-souri and Illinois is largely due to the barbarous bar-barous and inhuman conduct of seltpro fessing philanthropists of tie Tribune stripe and we say moreover that the proof is quite as conclusive that Judgo I GOODWIX who never voted any ticket but a Republican ticket where he got tho chance because of his devotion to protection protec-tion and the memories of the war is a slave as it is that any Mormon is a slave because for reasons which could not well be of less consequence or relevancy he otes the Peoples ticket And we would say if Mormon unity were not rendered imperative by Liberal vendictiveness that they still possess the right to vote just exactly I ex-actly as they please for reasons that seem best to them and that in doing so they are exercising the rights for which their patriot fathers fought Wo will grant pretty much all that the Tribune urges against the Mormons asking only the concession con-cession that they are lawabiding and we shall still insist that it affords no adequate ground for disfranchising them that they are united The judges defeat doth not rest easily on him |