the things he believes in.  The country has no truer friend.  Though I am an alien I am a resident, and therefore I can participate in political affairs and help him without being naturalized.  At the present time Douglas is in Springfield, and is much in the office of one of the newspapers there, to which he contributes editorials sometimes.  Recently the office was attacked by some men who had been accused of trickery of some sort by the newspaper.  Douglas was present; and, though he is a little fellow, he helped to beat off the attacking parties; and in the general assault the sheriff was stabbed by one of the editors; but the matter has all blown over.

“My own unfortunate affair has the appearance now of dying down.

“A very terrible thing has happened in the killing the Reverend Lovejoy at Alton, a town not far from Jacksonville.  He was running an abolition newspaper which was offensive to the slave interests or the peace interests, if you want to call them that.  And persisting in his agitation of the slave question they undertook to destroy his press.  In the altercation Lovejoy was shot.  There is great feeling over the matter.

“It is impossible for me to convey to you the intellectual atmosphere of the country.  It is so full of contradictions and cross currents.  For example, you come to believe that a Whig is against slavery.  Then some one comes forward to propose a certain General Harrison, a leading Whig, for President in 1840; and some one arises to show that when he was Governor of Indiana, when it was a territory, he tried to introduce slavery, contrary to the Ordinance of 1787.  I wrote you of this Ordinance before.  Then there are the most numerous groups of people of every sort of weird convictions; some organized to oppose Masonry; others to curb the Irish and the Catholics; others to prohibit the use of wine and all intoxicants; others to advance the cause of free love; others to socialize the state.  There are also religious societies here of every description, such as the Millerites who are now preparing for the Second Advent of Christ which they believe will take place in 1843.  They are already making ready to leave their business, get their white robes, and await the Epiphany.  In this state, at Nauvoo, a group called Mormons, who came here from Missouri, founded their faith upon a new revelation brought to light by two miraculous stones, said to have been discovered by a man named Joseph Smith.  They practice polygamy, as in patriarchal times.  They are already stirring up opposition to themselves, for where every one is so good and in his own peculiar way, hostility must result.  And in this Democracy, so-called, all the really good people are in the business of forcing others to their own way of thinking.  I must tell you also of a branch of the Presbyterian church which separated from the old church on the question of predestination and infant damnation.  Of Baptists, Methodists, and others there are numerous sects, which in England would be frowned upon as various forms of ludicrous non-conformism.  De Tocqueville’s book, for which my thanks to you, dear grandmama, will preserve a very faithful picture of America of this day.