To encourage foreign immigration for the development of the resources of the State, to build railroads, open coal beds, work lead mines and melt iron mountains, special legislation may have been necessary, but a State consists of something other than broad, fertile acres for agricultural purposes, or coal beds, lead mines, iron mountains and railroads. These may be fruitful sources of material wealth, and may be necessary to support and sustain a vast population, but they can not create intelligence, promote virtue, regulate the social system, or in any way define and adjust the higher duties and prerogatives of citizenship. The wisest legislation protects equally the rights of all and confers exclusive privileges upon none, and the best government guarantees equal rights to all its citizens. It is natural to expect that foreigners coming to these shores and settling in these States would accept the institutions with the protection of the government, and not seek to supplant the institutions of the State that offers them home and shelter; and yet it will not be denied that the foreigners in Missouri, taking advantage of the readiness of politicians to truckle to their passions and prejudices, have made strong demands upon the peculiar institutions of the State, and their demands have not been unheeded. It could not be expected that German rationalists, who could scarcely speak English well enough to carry on the most ordinary traffic, would understand, or care to understand, those institutions of the State which characterized the State as a Christian commonwealth. Nor did legislators, politicians, editors or preachers consider the moral forces they were starting and fostering for evil, and the subtle agencies that would work with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish, and whose coming was after the manner of Satan, with all power, and signs, and lying wonders, deceiving the very elect, and spending its force and fury upon the desecrated altars and martyred ministers of Christianity. Other and different agencies were at work, and had been for years, which could not be reached or affected by State legislation, and which contributed no little to that state of the public mind which put the institutions and ministers of Christianity under disability—what was commonly denominated “Spiritualism.” It existed in a multitude of forms, had many names, and manifested itself in many strange phenomena. Professing to hold communication with the spirit world and receive intelligence from departed spirits, it appealed strongly to the curious, the credulous and the superstitious.