Yet many of their best men had come to feel that there was wrong and injustice done the minority; that there should be a stop put to the open ignoring of Democratic lawyers, numbering in their ranks many men of wide learning and of great practical ability; that the spectacle of a Federal state-attorney prosecuting Republican editors was not edifying, and that the imprisonment of such offenders and their trial before a hostile judiciary opened that branch of the state government to damaging and dangerous suspicion. [205] In July, 1812, a meeting was called in Judge Baldwin's office in New Haven, with President Dwight in the chair, to organize a Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Promotion of Good Morals. At this meeting the political situation was thoroughly discussed, and measures were taken to cope with it. I am persuaded [wrote the Rev. Lyman Beecher to Rev. Asahel Hooker in the following November] that the time has come when it becomes every friend of the State to wake up and exert his whole influence to save it from innovation.... That the effort to supplant Governor Smith [s] will be made is certain unless at an early stage the noise of rising opposition will be so great as to deter them; and if it is made, a separation is made in the Federal party and a coalition with Democracy, which will in my opinion be permanent, unless the overthrow by the election should throw them into despair or inspire repentance. If we stand idle we lose our habits and institutions piecemeal, as fast as innovations and ambitions shall dare to urge on the work. My request is that you will see Mr. Theodore Dwight, expressing to him your views on the subject, ... and that you will in your region touch every spring, _lay_ or clerical, which you can touch prudently, that these men do not steal a march upon us, and that the rising opposition may meet them early, before they have gathered strength. Every blow struck now will have double the effect it will after the parties are formed and the lines drawn. I hope we shall not act independently, but I hope we shall all act, who fear God or regard men. [206] Writing of the meeting to organize the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Formation of Good Morals, Dr. Beecher in his "Autobiography" gives a sketch of the politics of the time that had led up to the occasion. One of the prominent actors of the time, he tells us that this meeting, composed of prominent Federalists of all classes, was unusual, for--