Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we
had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of
polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to
calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I
had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was
feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I
saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my
head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically “homely”
creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I
said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian
charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not harsh
censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of
open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand
uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”