True it may be said that the worst acts of cruelty were perpetrated by low, brutish men among the mob or in the militia--for these bodies were convertible from one to the other on shortest possible notice, and wholly as the exigencies of the enemies of the Saints demanded--but these were led and abetted by quite a different order of men: by lawyers, members of the state legislature, by county and district judges, by physicians, by professed ministers of the gospel, by merchants, by leading politicians, by captains, majors, colonels, and generals--of several grades--of the militia, by many other high officials of the state including the Governor and Lieutenant Governor, and finally by the action of the state legislature which appropriated two hundred thousand dollars to defray the expenses incurred by the mob-militia in carrying out the Governor's order, exterminating the Saints from the state. These facts are made apparent in the pages of this and the two preceding volumes of the HISTORY OF THE CHURCH. The facts cannot be questioned. They are written out most circumstantially in the Prophet's story. Times, places, and names are given of the incidents related, and the more important of these may be corroborated by histories of these events other than our own. The persecutions then of the Latter-day Saints in Missouri, and their final expulsion from that state, were crimes against the enlightenment of the age and of the state where the acts occurred; a crime against the constitutions and institutions both of the state of Missouri and of the United States; as also a crime against the Christian religion. All this we have in mind when speaking of the severity and cruelty of these compared with other persecutions. The state of Missouri was {XIX} guilty of a greater crime when it persecuted the Latter-day Saints than states were which in the barbarous times of the dark ages persecuted their people; though when estimated in net results there may have been more murders and robberies, greater destruction of property, and more wide-spread suffering in the latter than in the former. It is in the light of the principle here laid down that I propose to review the causes of the persecutions of the Latter-day Saints in Missouri. _The People of Missouri and the Saints_.