Strike, till the last armed foe expires; Strike, for your altars and your fires! Strike for the green graves of your sires, God, and your native land! An infinitely harmful part of the proclamation was the following: Leave your property at home. What if it be taken--all taken? We have $200,000,000 worth of Northern means in Missouri which cannot be removed. When we are once free the State will indemnify every citizen who may have lost a dollar by adhesion to the cause of his country. We shall have our property, or its value, with interest. 288 This was naturally interpreted as meaning that all those not distinctly favorable to Secession forfeited their property to those who were. This seemed ample warrant to the Poor White Trash banditti for seizure of the property of any man whose principles might not be of exactly the right shade. Experience teaches us that that class of people are pretty certain to find heterodox the opinions of any man who has something they may want. It certainly made a very dark outlook for anybody in Missouri to hold moveable property. The turbid thrasonics of the proclamation shows that it was not written by Price's Adjutant-General, Thomas L. Snead, who was a literary man. He was then absent at Richmond looking after the fences of his General. The proclamation sounds the more as if it came from the pen of our poetical acquaintance, M. Jeff Thompson, the "Swamp Fox" of the Mississippi. It concluded in this perfervid style: But, in the name of God and the attributes of manhood, let me appeal to you by considerations infinitely higher than money! Are we a generation of driveling, sniveling, degraded slaves? Or are we men who dare assert and maintain the rights which cannot be surrendered, and defend those principles of everlasting rectitude, pure and high and sacred, like God, their author? Be yours the office to choose between the glory of a free country and a just Government, and the bondage of your children! I will never see the chains fastened upon my country. I will ask for six and one-half feet of Missouri soil in which to repose, but will not live to see my people enslaved. Do I hear your shouts? Is that your war-cry which echoes through the land? Are you coming? Fifty thousand men! Missouri shall move to victory with the tread of a giant! Come on, my brave boys, 50,000 heroic, gallant, unconquerable Southern men! We await your coming. 289 Sterling Price established his headquarters again at Osceola, on the banks of the Osage, but sent forward Gens. Rains and Steen to Lexington, the best point on the Missouri to hold the river and afford a passage for recruits coming in from the northern part of the State.