When good old John Robinson, at Leyden, heard of the Wessagusset killing he was sorely moved. He wrote out to his flock a letter of gentle caution in respect to the rough ways of Captain Miles Standish, who, though the aged pastor loved him, he yet intimated was one perchance “wanting that tenderness of the life of man which is meet.” He also referred to the Wessagusset settlers as “heathenish Christians,” and exclaimed in reference to Pecksuot and Wituwamat, “Oh! how happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you had killed any.”[28] Nevertheless, rough as he was, the Plymouth people then stood in greater need of stern Miles Standish than of gentle John Robinson. The times were not meet for works of conversion, nor were Pecksuot and his friends favorable subjects therefor. In the light of the Virginia experience of 1622, and of the New England terror during the war of King Philip, posterity must concede that the severe course of Miles Standish here in Weymouth, in March, 1623, was the most truly merciful course. The settlers had demoralized the Indians. They had at once inspired them with anger, with dislike and with contempt. Any sign of faltering on the part of the Plymouth people would have been fatal. Had they abandoned Wessagusset to its fate, the settlers there would have been exterminated, and the savages, maddened by a taste of blood, would have turned upon Plymouth. The woods would have rung with war-whoops and the feeble colony could scarcely have survived the ordeal of blood treading hard on that of famine. Standish crushed out the danger in the incipient stage. By ruthlessly murdering seven men he re-established the moral ascendency of the whites, and so saved the lives of hundreds. He stopped the war before it began, and deferred it to another generation. In so doing, the Puritan captain revealed the instinctive sagacity of a true soldier,--he struck so that he did not have to strike twice:--he cowed the savages at Weymouth, and for years peace was secured for Plymouth.[29]