"I can readily believe your statement that it is very far from your feelings and most of the command that are with you to interfere with our social habits or religious views. One must naturally suppose that among gentlemen educated for the army alone, who have been occupied by the study of the art of war, whose pulses have throbbed with pleasure at the contemplation of the deeds of our venerated fathers, whose minds have been elated by the recital of the heroic deeds of other nations, and who have listened almost exclusively to the declamations of patriots and heroes, that there is not much time and less inclination to listen to the low party bickerings of political demagogues, the interested twaddle of sectional declaimers, or the throes and contortions of contracted religious bigots. You are supposed to stand on elevated ground, representing the power and securing the interests of the whole of a great and mighty nation. That many of you are thus honorable, I am proud as an American citizen to acknowledge, but you must excuse me, my dear sir, if I cannot concede with you that all your officials are so high-toned, disinterested, humane and gentlemanly, as a knowledge of some of their antecedents would expressly demonstrate. However, it is not with the personal character, the amiable qualities, high-toned feelings, or gentlemanly deportment of the officers in your expedition that we at present have to do. The question that concerns us is one that is independent of your personal, generous, friendly and humane feeling, or any individual predilection of yours; it is one that involves the dearest rights of American citizens, strikes at the root of our social and political existence, if it does not threaten our entire annihilation from the earth. Excuse me, sir, when I say that you are merely the servants of a lamentably corrupt administration, that your primary law is obedience to orders, and that you come here with armed foreigners, with cannons, rifles, bayonets and broadswords, expressly and for the openly avowed purpose of 'cutting out the loathsome ulcer from the body politic.'