As to suing their persecutors as individuals before the United States courts, as citizens of one state suing citizens of another, it is only necessary to remind the reader of the insuperable difficulties attending upon that procedure to convince him of the futility of such action. The expensiveness of the undertaking, and the extreme poverty of the exiles alone would be sufficient to bar such an undertaking; for every one knows how bitterly hard it is for the poor to set the judicial machinery of organized society in motion in their favor. Then there was the evident conspiracy entered into by the mobs of Missouri to defeat the ends of justice in respect of the Saints: mobs which an unfriendly governor had converted into a state militia; to which that same governor gave an order to expel from the state or exterminate the entire people; under which order said mob-militia did expel from the state some twelve thousand citizens, depriving them of their property and liberty without due process of law; and afterwards the state through its legislature sanctioned and applauded the actions of this mob-militia for the part it had taken in causing said expulsion--though attended by acts of {XXIX} unspeakable atrocity--by appropriating 200,000 dollars to meet the expenses of the mob-militia in carrying out the governor's illegal orders. After these crimes against the Constitution and laws of the state, against American institutions and the civilization of the age--after all this, I say, it is not difficult to understand how farcical would be any procedure before either the state or the federal courts in Missouri. By acts of perjury, in order to still further defeat the ends of justice and protect each other from the penalties due to their crimes, it would have been easy for the people of Missouri to defeat the ends of justice. And after having committed the crimes of murder and robbery; after having unlawfully expelled a whole people, numbering thousands, from their homes--of which the despoilers were then possessed--it is not to be believed that such characters would hesitate to suborn witnesses, commit perjury, or hesitate to do any other thing, however criminal, in order to escape the just punishment for their crimes. The offense of the State of Missouri against the Saints was a denial of political as well as of civil rights. She had in her treatment of the Saints abdicated republican government. Her officers, including the chief executive of the state had violated the Constitution of the state in that they had entered into a wide-spread conspiracy to deprive the Saints of their liberty and property without due process of law; and in fact had deprived them of those rights by expelling them by force of arms from the state.