The general directed another manifesto against the fair sex, who, having the courage of their convictions, and relying on the courtesy and gallantry universally shown in our country to women, had vauntingly carried the Confederate flag on their persons, and at times had waved it to their rebel friends, who were confined in the Gratiot Street prison. He ordered their arrest. Some of them were apprehended and imprisoned. One, who had been a prominent worker in my own church and congregation, having been found guilty of conveying important information to the enemy, was banished from the city and State. Having acted the part of a spy, her punishment was exceedingly mild. If a man had committed the same crime he would have been shot or hung. In fact General Halleck had already ordered that all persons found within the Federal lines, giving aid to the rebels, be treated as spies, arrested and shot. But previous good character and deference to sex saved the guilty woman from a fate so dire. Other women of high social position, whose homes were outside the city in the State, had fled from the disorder and violence of their neighborhoods to St. Louis for safety. Generously protected within our gates and by our army, some of them hatched and executed schemes to aid the Southern Confederacy, to overturn the very government under whose sheltering wings they were abiding in security. While the disloyal deeds of many of them remained undiscovered, and they continued during the whole period of the war to dwell unmolested under the flag that they hated and clandestinely plotted to destroy, others, betrayed by their over-bold acts of disloyalty, were by our general remorselessly banished from our city. He sent them back to their homes in the State, around which the swirling tides of war still swept. Some prominent loyal men pleaded for them, but pleaded in vain. The general unflinchingly did his duty as he saw it. Nor did the disloyal press elude his eye, or escape his retributive hand. By his direction the provost-marshal general ordered all newspapers throughout the State to furnish him a copy of each issue. The penalty for any failure to obey this drastic mandate was suppression or confiscation.