I admire the industry of your people, their notable labors and their general sincerity, but I deplore their delusion, and I denounce their deceivers. I have carefully chosen my course, and shall, with the help of God, pursue it.
That you will ever be made, in this life, to see your madness and its inevitable consequences, I can not believe. That you would forsake it if you did see it, I can not hope. One thing is certain, you have forged your own chains, as well as the fetters that you have fastened on your deluded people. You are as hopelessly your own slave as ever you wished to make others.
But while you can not retract the past, you are still able to prevent much sorrow and difficulties in the future. The political ambition of Joseph Smith entailed suffering, exodus, and death upon his blindly devoted and fanatically infatuated followers. Your political ambition will involve in the same disastrous consequences your still more numerous adherents. Your own wisdom must teach that your object of founding an independent kingdom is hopeless; and that to attempt it is to insure your own destruction. You must be aware, too, that while religious martyrs are pitied, political adventurers are despised; and that such a course will divest you of all sympathy, and hand you and your ambition down to universal execration and contempt. If you do push matters to so lamentable an extremity as to come into collision with the federal authorities, remember that it is YOU and not THEY who will then be the real cause of the suffering and bloodshed that will ensue! Were you the President of the United States to-morrow, and were such another system as Mormonism, with
