When I last preached, I heard such a groaning, I thought of the Paddy's eel. When he tried to kill it, he could not contrive any better way to do it, so he put it into the water to drown it; and as it began to come to, "See," said he, "what pain it is in; how it wiggles its tail." So it is with the nation: the banks are failing, and it is our privilege to say what kind of currency we want. We want gold and silver to build the Temple and Nauvoo House: we want your old nose-rings, and finger rings, and brass kettles no longer. If you have old rags, watches, guns, &c., go and peddle them off, and bring the hard metal; and if we will do this by popular opinion, we shall have a sound currency. Send home all bank notes, and take no more paper money. Let every man write back to his neighbors before he starts for home to exchange his property for gold and silver, that he may fulfil the scripture, and come up to Zion, bringing his gold and silver with him. I have contemplated these things a long time, but the time had not come for me to speak of them till now. I would not do as the Nauvoo House committee have done--{287}sell stock for an old store-house, where all the people who tried to live in it died, and put that stock into a man's hands to go east and purchase rags to come here and build mammoth bones with. As a political man, in the name of old Joe Smith, I command the Nauvoo House committee not to sell stock in the Nauvoo House without the gold or silver. We must excuse Brother Snider, for he was in England when the committee sold stock for the store-house. I leave this subject. This meeting was got up by the Nauvoo House committee. The pagans, Roman Catholics, Methodists and Baptists shall have place in Nauvoo--only they must be ground in Joe Smith's mill. I have been in their mill. I was ground in Ohio and York States, in a Presbyterian smut machine, and the last machine was in Missouri; and the last of all, I have been through the Illinois smut machine; and those who come here must go through my smut machine, and that is my tongue.