together as far as possible the regular and irregular forces of the
country. There are in England three classes of soldiery--the regular
army, the militia, and the volunteers. The militia constitute a force as
nearly as possible corresponding with that in whose companionship Sir
John Falstaff declined to march through Coventry. Bombastes Furioso or
the Grande Duchesse hardly ever marshalled such a body of men as may be
seen when a British militia regiment is turned out for exercise. Awkward
country bumpkins and beer-swilling rowdies of the poacher class make up
the bulk of the privates. They are a terror to any small town where they
may happen to be exercising, and where not infrequently they finish up a
day's drill by a general smashing of windows, sacking of shops, and
plundering of inhabitants. The volunteers are a force composed of a
much better class of men, and are capable, I think, of great military
efficiency and service if properly organized. Of late the volunteer
force has, I believe, been growing somewhat demoralized. The Government
never gave it very cordial encouragement, its position was hardly
defined, and the national enthusiasm out of which it sprang naturally
began to languish. We in England have always owed our volunteer force to
some sudden menace or dread of French invasion. It was so in the time of
William Pitt. We all remember the famous sarcasm with which that
statesman replied to the request of some volunteer regiments not to be
sent out on foreign service. Pitt gravely assured them that they never
should be sent out of the country unless in case of England's invasion.
Erskine was a volunteer, and I think it was as an officer of volunteers
that Gibbon said he acquired a practical knowledge of military affairs,
which proved useful to him in describing the decline and fall of the
Roman empire. Our present volunteer service originated in the last of
the "three panics" described by Cobden--the fear of invasion by Louis
Napoleon, the panic which Tennyson endeavored to foment by his weak and
foolish "Form, form! Riflemen, form!" The volunteer force, however,
continued to grow stronger and stronger long after the alarm had died
away; and even though recently the progress of improvement seems to have
been somewhat checked, and the volunteer body to have become lax in its
organization, it appears to me that in its intelligence, its
earnestness, and its physical capacity there exists the material out of
which might be moulded a very valuable arm of the military service. The
War Minister now proposes to take steps which shall render the militia a
decent body, commanded by really qualified and responsible officers,
which shall give better officers to the volunteers, and place these
latter under more effective discipline, and which shall bring militia
and volunteers into closer relationship with the regular army. How far
these objects may be attained by the measures now under consideration I
do not pretend to judge; but I cannot regard the present War Minister as
a man highly qualified for the place he holds. Mr. Cardwell is an
admirable clerk--patient, plodding, untiring; but I doubt whether he has
any of the higher qualities of an administrator or much force of
character. He is perhaps the very dullest speaker holding a marked
position in the House of Commons. He is fluent, not as Gladstone and a
river are fluent, but as the sand in an hour-glass is fluent. That sand
itself is not more dull, colorless, monotonous, and dry, than is the
eloquence of the War Minister. Mr. Cardwell is not always fortunate in
his military prophecies. On the memorable night in last July when the
news reached London that France had declared war against Prussia, Mr.
Cardwell affirmed that that meant the occupation of Berlin by the French
within a month. It must be remembered, however, as an excuse for the War
Minister's unlucky prediction, that an English military commission sent
to examine the two systems had shortly before reported wholly in favor
of the French army organization and dead against that of Prussia.
The English Government, wisely, I think, decline to attempt the
introduction of any measure for general and compulsory service, except
as a last resource in desperate exigencies. The England of the future is
not likely, I trust, to embroil herself much in Continental quarrels;
and she may be quite expected to hold her own in the improbable event of
any of her neighbors attempting to invade her. For myself, I can
recollect no instance recorded by history of any foreign war wherein
England took part, from which good temper, discretion, judgment, and
justice would not alike have counselled her to hold aloof.
Such then are in substance the changes which are proposed for the
reconstruction of the English army. The one grand reform or revolution
is the abolition of the purchase system. This change will inevitably
convert the army into a practical and regular profession, to which all
classes will look as a possible means of providing for some of their
children. It will have one advantage over the bar, that admission to the
ranks of the officers will not necessarily involve the preliminary
payment of any sum of money, however small. The profession will cease to
be ornamental and aristocratic. It will no longer constitute one of the
great props, one of the grand privileges, of the system of aristocracy.
Its reorganization will be another and a bold step toward the
establishment of that principle of equality which is of late years
beginning to exercise so powerful a fascination over the popular mind of
England. Caste had in Great Britain no such illustration and no such
bulwark as the army system presented. I should be slow to undertake to
limit the possible depth and extent of the influence which the impulse
given by this reform may exercise over the political condition of
England. I can hardly realize to myself by any effort of imagination the
effect which such a change will work in what is called society in
England, and in the literature, especially the romantic and satirical
literature, of the country. Are we then no longer to have Rawdon
Crawley, and Sir Derby Oaks, and "Captain Gandaw of the Pinks"? Was
Black-Bottle Cardigan really the last of a race? Will people a
generation hence fail to understand what was meant by the intimation
that "the Tenth don't dance"? Is Guy Livingstone to become as utter a
tradition and myth as Guy of Warwick? Is the English military officer to
be henceforward simply a hard-working, well-qualified public servant,
who obtains his place in open competition by virtue of his merits?
Appreciate the full meaning of the change who can, it is too much for
me; I can only wonder, admire, and hope. But it is surely not possible
that the Duke of Cambridge, cousin of the Queen, can continue to preside
over a service wherein the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker
have as good a chance of obtaining commissions for their sons as the
marquis or the earl or the great millionaire. Only think of the flood of
light which will be poured in upon all the details of the military
organization, when once it becomes the direct interest of each of us to
see that the profession is properly managed in which his own son,
however poor in purse and humble in rank, has a chance of obtaining a
commission! I believe the Duke of Cambridge had and has an honest hatred
and contempt for the coarse and noisy interference of public and
unprofessional criticism where the business of the sacred Horse Guards
is concerned. Once, when goaded on to sheer desperation by comments in
the papers, his Royal Highness actually wrote or dictated a letter of
explanation to the "Times," signed with the monosyllabic grandeur of his
name "George," we all held up the hands and eyes of wonder that such
things had come to pass, that royal princes condescended to write to
newspapers, and yet the world rolled on. I cannot think the Duke will
abide the awful changes that are coming. He will probably pass into the
twilight and repose of some dignified office, where blundering has no
occupation and obstinacy can do no harm. Everything considered, I think
we may say of him that he might have been a great deal worse than he
was. My own impression is that he is rather better than his reputation.
If the popular voice of England were to ask in the words of
Shakespeare's "Lucio," "And was the Duke a fleshmonger, a fool, and a
coward, as you then reported him to be?" I might answer, in the language
of the pretended friar, "You must change persons with me ere you make
that my report. You indeed spoke so of him, and much more, much worse."
BRIGHAM YOUNG.
Those among us who are not too young to have had "Evenings at Home" for
a schoolday companion and instructor will remember the story called
"Eyes and No Eyes" and its moral. They will remember that, of the two
little boys who accomplished precisely the same walk at the same time,
one saw all manner of delightful and wonderful things, while the other
saw nothing whatever that was worth recollection or description. The
former had eyes prepared to see, and the other had not; and that made
all the difference. I have to confess that, during a recent visit to
Salt Lake City--a visit lasting nearly as many days as that out of which
my friend, Hepworth Dixon, made the better part of a volume--I must have
been in the condition of the dull little reprobate who had no eyes to
see the wonders which delighted his companion. For, so far as the city
itself, its streets and its structures, are concerned, I really saw
nothing in particular. A muddy little country town, with one or two
tolerably decent streets, wherein a few handsome stores are mixed up
with old shanties, is not much to see in any part of the civilized
world. Other travellers have seen a wondrous sight on the very same
spot. They have seen a large and beautiful city, with spacious, splendid
streets, shaded by majestic trees and watered by silvery currents
flowing in marble channels; they have seen a city combining the
cleanliness and activity of young America with the picturesqueness and
dignity of the Orient; a city which would be beautiful and wonderful
anywhere, but which, raised up here on the bare bosom of the desert, is
a phenomenon of apparently almost magical creation. Naturally,
therefore, they have gone into raptures over the energy, and industry,
and aestheticism of the Mormons; and, even while condemning sternly the
doctrine and practice of polygamy, they have nevertheless been haunted
by an uneasy doubt as to whether, after all, there is not some peculiar
virtue in the having half a dozen wives together which endows a man with
super-human gifts as a builder of cities. Otherwise how comes this
beautiful and perfect city, here on the unfriendly and unsheltering
waste?
Well, I saw no beautiful and wonderful city, although I spent several
days in the Mormon capital, and tramped every one of its streets, and
lanes, and roads, scores of times over. Where others beheld the glorious
virgin, Dulcinea del Toboso, radiant in beauty and bedight with queenly
apparel, I saw only the homely milkmaid, with her red elbows and her
russet gown. In plain words, the Mormon city appeared to me just a
commonplace little country town, and no more. I saw in it no evidences
of preternatural energy or skill. It has one decent street, wherein may
be found, at most, half a dozen well-built and attractive-looking shops.
It has a good many comfortable residences in the environs. It has two or
three decentish hotels, like the hotels of any other fiftieth-class
country town. It has the huge Tabernacle, a gigantic barn merely, a
simple covering in and over of so much space--a thing in shape "very
like a land turtle," as President George L. Smith, First Councillor of
Brigham Young, observed to me. Salt Lake City has no lighting and no
draining, except such draining as is done by the little runnels of water
to be found in every street, and which remind one faintly and sadly of
dear, quaint old Berne in Switzerland. At night you have to trudge along
in the darkness and the mud, or slush, or dust, and it is a perilous
quest the seeking of your way home, for at every crossing you must look
or feel for the plank which bridges over the artificial brooklets
already described, or you plunge helpless and hopeless into the little
torrent. Decidedly, a "one-horse" place, in my estimation; I don't see
how men endowed with average heads and arms could for twenty years have
been occupied in the building of a city, and produced anything less
creditable than this. I do not wonder at the complacency and
self-conceit with which all the Mormon residents talk of the beauty of
their city and the wonderful things they have accomplished, when Gentile
travellers of credit and distinction have glorified this shabby, swampy,
ricketty, common-place, vulgar, little hamlet into a town of sweetness
and light, of symmetry and beauty. For my part, and for those who were
with me, I can only say that we spent the first day or so in perpetual
wonder as to whether this really could be the Mormon city of which we
had read so many bewildering and glorious descriptions. And the
theatre--oh, Hepworth Dixon, I like you much, and I think you are often
abused and assailed most unjustly; but how could you write so about that
theatre? Or was the beautiful temple of the drama which _you_ saw here
deliberately taken down, and did they raise in its place the big, gaunt,
ugly, dirty, dismal structure which _I_ saw, and in which I and my
companions made part of a dreary dozen or two of audience, and blinked
in the dim, depressing light of mediaeval oil-lamps? I observe that, when
driven to bay by sceptical inquiry, complacent Mormons generally fall
back on the abundance of shade-trees in the streets. Let them have the
full credit of this plantation. They have put trees in the streets, and
the trees have grown; and, when we observe to a Mormon that we have seen
rows of trees similarly growing in even smaller towns of the benighted
European continent, he evidently thinks it is our monogamic perversity
and prejudice which force us to deny the wondrous works of Mormonism.
Making due allowance for every natural difficulty, remembering how
nearly every implement, and utensil, and scrap of raw material had to be
brought from across yonder rampart of mountains, and from hundreds of
miles away, I yet fail to see anything very remarkable about this little
Mormon town. Perhaps no other set of people could have made much more of
the place; I cannot help thinking that no other set of people who were
not Digger Indians could have made much less.
In fact, to retain the proper and picturesque ideas of Salt Lake City,
one never ought to have entered the town at all. We ought to have
remained on this hillside, from which you can look across that most
lovely of all valleys on earth, cinctured as it is by a perfect girdle
of mountains, the outlines of which are peerless and ineffable in their
symmetry and beauty. The air is as clear, the skies are as blue, the
grass as green as the dream of a poet or painter could show him. There
below, fringed and mantled in the clustering green of its trees, you see
the city, with the long, low, rounded dome or back of the Tabernacle
rising broad and conspicuous. Looking down, you may well believe that
the city thus exquisitely placed, thus deliciously shaded and
surrounded, is itself a wonder of picturesqueness and symmetry. Why go
down into the two or three dirty, irregular, shabby little streets, with
their dust or mud for road pavement, their nozzling pigs trotting along
the sidewalks, their dung-heaps and masses of decaying vegetable matter,
their utterly commonplace, mean and disheartening aspect everywhere? But
then we did go down--and where others had seen a fair and goodly, aye,
and queenly city, we saw a muddy, uninteresting, straggling little
village, disfiguring the lovely plain on which it stood.
Profound disappointment, then, is my first sensation in Salt Lake City.
The place is so like any other place! Certainly, one receives a bracing
little shock every now and then, which admonishes him that, despite the
small, shabby stores and the pigs, and the dunghills, he is not in the
regions of merely commonplace dirt. For instance, we learn that the
proprietor of the hotel where we are staying has four wives; and it is
something odd to talk with a civil, respectable, burgess-like man,
dressed in ordinary coat and pantaloons, and wearing mutton-chop
whiskers--a sort of man who in England would probably be a
church-warden--and who has more consorts than an average Turk. Then
again it is startling to be asked, "Do you know Mr. ----?" and when I
say "No, I don't," to be told, "Oh, you ought to know him. He came from
England, and he has lately married two such nice English girls!" One
morning, too, we have another kind of shock. There is a pretty little
chambermaid in our hotel, a new-comer apparently, and she happens to
find out that my wife and I had lived for many years in that part of the
North of England from which she comes herself, whereupon she bursts into
a perfect passion and tempest of tears, declares that she would rather
be in her grave than in Salt Lake City, that she was deceived into
coming, that the Mormonism she heard preached by the Mormon propaganda
in England was a quite different thing from the Mormonism practised
here, and that her only longing was to get out of the place, anyhow,
forever. The girl seemed to be perfectly, passionately sincere. What
could be done for her? Apparently nothing. She had spent all her money
in coming out; and she seemed to be strongly under the conviction that,
even if she had money, she could not get away. An influence was
evidently over her which she had not the courage or strength of mind to
attempt to resist, or even to elude. Doubtless, as she was a very pretty
girl, she would be very soon sealed to some ruling elder. She said her
sister had come with her, but the sister was in another part of the
city, and since their arrival--only a few days, however--they had not
met. My wife endeavored to console or encourage her, but the girl could
only sob and protest that she never could learn to endure the place, but
that she could not get away, and that she would rather be in her grave.
We spoke of this case to one of the civil officers of the United States
stationed in the city, and he shook his head and thought nothing could
be done. The influence which enslaved this poor girl was not wholly that
of force, but a power which worked upon her senses and her
superstitions. I should think an underground railway would be a valuable
institution to establish in connection with the Mormon city.
I well remember that when I lived in Liverpool, some ten or a dozen
years ago, the Mormon propaganda, very active there, always kept the
polygamy institution modestly in the background. Proselytes were courted
and won by descriptions of a new Happy Valley, of a City of the Blest,
where eternal summer shone, where the fruits were always ripe, where the
earth smiled with a perpetual harvest, where labor and reward were
plenty for all, and where the outworn toilers of Western Europe could
renew their youth like the eagles. I remember, too, the remarkable case
of a Liverpool family having a large business establishment in the most
fashionable street of the great town, who were actually beguiled into
selling off all their goods and property and migrating, parents, sons,
and daughters, to the land of promise beyond the American wilderness,
and how, before people had ceased to wonder at their folly, they all
came back, humiliated, disgusted, cured. They had money and something
like education, and they were a whole family, and so they were able,
when they found themselves deceived, to effect a rapid retreat at the
cost of nothing worse than disappointment and pecuniary loss. But for
the poor, pretty serving-lass from Lancashire I do not know that there
is much hope. Poverty and timidity and superstitious weakness will help
to lock the Mormon chains around her. Perhaps she will get used to the
place in time. Ought one to wish that she may--or rather to echo her own
prayer, and petition that she may find an early grave? The graveyards
are densely planted with tombs here in this sacred city of Mormonism.
The place is unspeakably dreary. Hardly any women are ever seen in the
streets, except on the Sunday, when all the families pour in to service
in the huge Tabernacle. Most of the dwelling houses round the city are
pent in behind walls. Most of the houses, too, have their dismal little
_sucursales_, one or two or more, built on to the sides--and in each of
these additions or wings to the original building a different wife and
family are caged. There are no flower gardens anywhere. Children are
bawling everywhere. Sometimes a wretched, slatternly, dispirited woman
is seen lounging at the door or hanging over the gate of a house with a
baby at her breast. More often, however, the house, or clump of houses,
gives no external sign of life. It stands back gloomy in the sullen
shade of its thick fruit trees, and might seem untenanted if one did not
hear the incessant yelling of the children. We saw the women in
hundreds, probably in thousands, at the Tabernacle on the Sunday--and
what women they were! Such faces, so dispirited, depressed, shapeless,
hopeless, soulless faces! No trace of woman's graceful pride and
neatness in these slatternly, shabby, slouching, listless figures; no
purple light of youth over these cheeks; no sparkle in these
half-extinguished eyes. I protest that only in some of the _cretin_
villages of the Swiss mountains have I seen creatures in female form so
dull, miserable, moping, hopeless as the vast majority of these Mormon
women. As we leave the Tabernacle, and walk slowly down the street amid
the crowd, we see two prettily-dressed, lively-looking girls, who laugh
with each other and are seemingly happy, and we thank Heaven that there
are at least two merry, spirited girls in Salt Lake City. A few days
after we meet our blithesome pair at Mintah station; and they are
travelling with their father and mother on to San Francisco, whither we
too are going--and we learn that they are not Mormons, but
Gentiles--pleasant lasses from Philadelphia who had come with their
parents to have a passing look at the externals of Mormonism.
My object, however, in writing this paper was to speak of the chief,
Brigham Young himself, rather than of his city or his system. We saw
Brigham Young, were admitted to prolonged speech of him, and received
his parting benediction. The interview took place in the now famous
house with the white walls and the gilded beehive on the top. We were
received in a kind of office or parlor, hung round with oil paintings of
the kind which in England we regard as "furniture," and which
represented all the great captains and elders of Mormonism. Joseph Smith
is there, and Brigham Young, and George L. Smith, now First Councillor;
and various others whom to enumerate would be long, even if I knew or
remembered their names. President Young was engaged just at the moment
when we came, but his Secretary, a Scotchman, I think, and President
George L. Smith, are very civil and cordial. George L. Smith is a huge,
burly man, with a Friar Tuck joviality of paunch and visage, and a roll
in his bright eye which, in some odd, undefined sort of way, suggests
cakes and ale. He talks well, in a deep rolling voice, and with a dash
of humor in his words and tone--he it is who irreverently but accurately
likens the Tabernacle to a land-turtle. He speaks with immense
admiration and reverence of Brigham Young, and specially commends his
abstemiousness and hermit-like frugality in the matter of eating and
drinking. Presently a door opens, and the oddest, most whimsical figure
I have ever seen off the boards of an English country theatre stands in
the room; and in a moment we are presented formally to Brigham Young.