Ours is a government of laws, to them we all owe obedience, and their faithful administration is the best guarantee for the enjoyment of our rights. No citizen, nor number of citizens, have a right to take the redress of their grievances, whether real or imaginary, into their own hands. Such conduct strikes at the very existence of society, and subverts the very foundation on which it is based. I am not willing to persuade myself that any portion of the citizens of the State of Missouri are so lost to a sense of these truths as to require the exercise of _force,_ in order to insure respect for them. He advised the threatened saints, therefore, to make a trial of the efficacy of the laws; that wherein their lives had been threatened, they make affidavit to that effect before the circuit judge, or the justices of the peace in their respective districts, whose duty it then became to bind the threatening parties to keep the peace. By this experiment it would be proven whether the laws could be executed or not; and in the event that they could not be peacefully executed, the governor pledged himself, on being officially notified of that fact, to take such steps as would insure a favorable execution of them. As to the injuries the saints had sustained in the loss of property, the governor advised them to seek redress by civil process--expressing the opinion that the courts would grant them relief.[B] [Footnote B: Evening and Morning Star, p. 351.] I do not doubt the sincerity of Governor Dunklin in giving this counsel to the saints, and under ordinary circumstances to seek redress at the hands of the civil authorities would be the proper thing to do. But in this case the officers of the law had been the head and front of this high-handed and infamous proceeding. In proof of this statement I give the names and offices held by those who were most active in the lawless proceeding related: S. D. LUCAS, _colonel, and judge of the county court;_ SAMUEL C. OWENS, _county clerk;_ RUSSEL HICKS, _deputy clerk;_ JOHN SMITH, _justice of the peace;_ SAMUEL WESTON, _justice of the peace;_ WILLIAM BROWN, _constable;_ THOMAS PITCHER, _deputy constable._ Besides these there were Indian agents, postmasters, doctors, lawyers and merchants. These were the men who had despoiled the saints--these the ones, in connection with the secret assistance of the lieutenant governor of the State, LILBURN W. BOGGS, who inflamed the minds of the ignorant frontier settlers against an innocent people, and encouraged the vicious to maltreat the virtuous. These were the men who on the 23rd of July of the same year had said: