"The elder who had delivered the first discourse now rose and said a certain brother whom he named had taken a keg of white lead. 'Now,' said he, 'if any of the brethren present has taken it by mistake, thinking it was his own, he ought to restore it; but if any of the brethren present have stolen a keg, much more ought he to restore it, or else maybe he will get catched.'... Another person rose and stated that he had lost a ten dollar bill. If any of the brethren had found it or taken it, he hoped it would be restored." This introduction of calls for the restoration of stolen property as a feature of a Sunday church service is probably unique with the Mormons. That the Mormons did not do all the thieving in the counties around Nauvoo while they were there would be sufficiently proved by the character of many of the persons whom they found there on their arrival, and also by the fact that their expulsion did not make those counties a paradise.* The trouble with them was that, as soon as a man joined them, no matter what his previous character might have been, they gave him that protection which came with their system of "standing together." An early and significant proof of this protection is found in the action of the conference held in Nauvoo on October 3, 1840, two months before the charter had given the city government its extended powers, which voted that "no person be considered guilty of crime unless proved by the testimony of two or three witnesses."** * "Long afterward, while the writer was travelling through Hancock, Pike and Adams Counties, no family thought of retiring at night without barring and doublelocking every ingress."--Beadle, "Life in Utah," p. 65. ** Millennial Star, Vol. XVIII, p. 153. It became notorious in all the country round that it was practically useless for a non-Mormon to attempt the recovery of stolen property in Nauvoo, no matter how strong the proof in his possession might be. S. J. Clarke* says that a great deal of stolen stock was traced into Nauvoo, but that, "when found, it was extremely difficult to gain possession of it." He cites as an illustration the case of a resident of that county who traced a stolen horse into Nauvoo, and took with him sixty witnesses to identify the animal before a Mormon justice of the peace. He found himself, however, confronted with seventy witnesses who swore that the horse belonged to some Mormon, and the justice decided that the "weight of evidence," numerically calculated, was against the non-Mormon. * "History of McDonough County," p. 83.