General Smith’s Views of the Power and Policy of the Government

by Joseph Smith. Nauvoo, Illinois. Printed by John Taylor. 1844. General Smith’s Views of the Power and Policy of the Government

NAUVOO, ILLINOIS.

PRINTED BY JOHN TAYLOR.

1 8 4 4.

G E N E R A L S M I T H ‘S V I E W S.

GEN. SMITH’S VIEWS OF THE POWERS AND POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT.

Born in a land of liberty, and breathing an air uncorrupted with the sirocco of barbarous climes, I ever feel a double anxiety for the happiness of all men, both in time and in eternity. My cogitations, like Daniel’s, have for a long time troubled me, when I viewed the condition of men throughout the world, and more especially in this boasted realm, where the Declaration of Independence “holds these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” but at the same time some two or three millions of people are held as slaves for life, because the spirit in them is covered with a darker skin than ours; and hundreds of our kindred for an infraction, or supposed infraction, of some over wise statute, have to be incarcerated in dungeon glooms, or suffer the more moral penitentiary gravitation of mercy in a nut-shell, while the duelist, the debauchee, and the defaulter for millions, and other criminals, take the upper-most rooms at feasts, or, like the bird of passage find a more congenial clime by flight.

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