“This discipline is generally sufficient to drive off the culprit; but should he continue obstinate, and refuse to avail himself of another warning, the Regulators pay him a second visit, inflict a still severer whipping, with the addition probably of cutting off both his ears. No culprit has ever been known to remain after a second visit. For instance, an old man, the father of a family, all of whom he educated as robbers, fixed himself at Moore’s Prairie, and committed numerous thefts, &c. &c. He was hardy enough to remain after the first visit, when both he and his sons received a whipping. At the second visit the Regulators punished him very severely, and cut off his ears. This drove him off, together with his whole gang; and travellers can now pass in perfect safety, where it was once dangerous to travel alone. “There is also a company of Regulators near Vincennes, who have broken up a notorious gang of coiners and thieves who had fixed themselves near that place. These rascals, before they were driven off, had parties settled at different distances in the woods, and thus held communication and passed horses and stolen goods from one to another, from the Ohio to Lake Erie, and from thence into Canada or the New England States. Thus it was next to impossible to detect the robbers, or to recover the stolen property. “While I was staying at the house of a Mr. Mulligan in Illinois, thirty miles from St. Louis, one of the men, who had belonged to the gang near Vincennes, was taken up on the charge of passing counterfeit money.... “This practice of _Regulating_ seems very strange to an European. I have talked with some of the chief men of the Regulators, who all lamented the necessity of such a system. They very sensibly remarked, that when the country became more thickly settled, there would no longer be any necessity for such proceedings, and that they should all be delighted at being able to obtain justice in a more formal manner. I forgot to mention, that the rascals punished, have sometimes prosecuted the Regulators, for an assault. The juries however, knowing the bad characters of the prosecutors, would give but trifling damages, which divided among so many, amounted to next to nothing for each individual.”[128] In a book entitled “Letters from the West,” which was published in London in 1828, Judge James Hall wrote on the subject of lynch-law as follows: