In the sparsely settled country of western Missouri, the descendants of the old cavaliers and their following, who settled the South, and the descendants of the Puritans, who settled the North, were to meet: and very naturally one may see in these antagonistic elements--aside from the cause of antagonism which will be found in the newly revealed religion of the Latter-day Saints--natural causes of irritation between them founded in the differences of character, and their respective conceptions of industrial, moral, and religious duties. That the old settlers {XXII} in Missouri, even those friendly disposed towards the Saints, recognized the incompatibility of the two classes is evident from the public utterances of a mass meeting held at Liberty, in Clay county, when the Saints were urged to seek anew locality where they could live by themselves. "They are eastern men," said the address, "whose manners, habits, customs, and even dialect, are essentially different from our own. We earnestly urge them to seek some other abiding place, where the manners, the habits, and customs of the people will be more consonant with their own." [4] This difference of character between the Saints and the old settlers I account one of the causes of the Missouri persecutions. _The Question of Slavery_. The question of slavery in Missouri was a delicate one. It will perhaps be remembered that it was the application of the territory of Missouri for admission into the Union, 1818-19, that brought the question of slavery into one of its acute stages before the country; and inaugurated a long series of debates in the National Congress on the subject. It was upon the admission of Missouri into the Union in 1821 that the great Compromise which bears the state's name settled, not the question of slavery itself, but, for the time, the agitation of it. That Compromise consisted finally in this: that while Missouri herself was admitted with a clause in her constitution permitting slavery, and also prohibiting free people of color from immigrating into the state, slavery was forever to be prohibited in all territory of the United States north of the line thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude (the southern boundary line of the state of Missouri); and Missouri was required "by a solemn, public act" of her legislature, to declare that the clause in her constitution relating to the immigration of free negroes into the state, should never be construed to authorize the passage of any law by which any citizen of either of the states in this Union shall be excluded from the enjoyment of any of the privileges and immunities to which he is entitled under the Constitution of the United States.