LEGISLATION AGAINST PLURALITY.
A people under a ban--What the Mormon men think of the
Anti-Polygamy Bill--And what the Mormon women say of
polygamy--Puzzling confidences--Practical plurality a very dull
affair--But theoretically a hedge-hog problem--Matrimonial
eccentricities--The fashionable milliner fatal to
plurality--Absurdity of comparing Moslem polygamy with Mormon
plurality--Are the women of Utah happy?--Their enthusiasm for
Women's Rights.
UTAH, therefore, at the time of my visit was "a proclaimed
district"--to use the Anglo-Indian phrase for tracts suspected of
infanticide--and every Mormon within it had a share in the disgrace
thrust upon it. Nor was the triumph of the Gentile concealed at the
result. The Mormons, therefore, were consolidated, in the first
instance, by the equal pressure of the new law upon all sections of the
church alike; in the next by the openly expressed exultation of the
Gentiles. I wrote at the time: "They feel that they are under a common
ban. The children have read the Bill or have had its purport explained
to them, and it is well known even among the Gentiles how keen the
grief was in every household when the news that the Bill had passed
reached Utah. Wives still shed bitter tears over the act of Congress
which breaks up their happy homes, and robs them and their children of
the protecting presence of a husband and father. The Bill was aimed to
put a stop to a supposed self-indulgence of the men. But the Mormons
have never thought of it in this light at all. They see in it only an
attempt to punish their wives. And it is this alleged cruelty to their
wives and children that has stubborned the Mormon men."
Meanwhile the Mormons' affect a contemptuous disregard Of the
Commission and all its works. I have spoken to many, some of them
leaders of local opinion, and everywhere I find the same amused
indifference to it expressed. "We have too many real troubles," they
say, "to go manufacturing imaginary ones. We must live our religion in
the present and leave the future to God."
"But," I would say, "this is not a question of the future. All children
born after the 1st of January, 1883, will be illegitimate--and in these
matters Nature is generally very punctual. Now, are you going to break
the law or going to keep it?"
Some would answer "neither," and some "both," but all would agree
that there was no necessity for worrying themselves about evils which
may never befall, and that the Edmunds Bill, with all its malignity
and cunning, was "a stupid blunder," an "impossible" enactment, "an
absurdity." So the questioning would probably end in laughter.
"But in spite of this expressed indifference to the working of the
Bill, there can be little doubt that the more responsible Mormons
have already made up their minds as to the course they will take.
'The people' will follow them of course, and forecasting the future,
therefore, I anticipate that a small minority will break down under the
pressure, and will return their plural wives to their parents, with
such provision as they can make for their future support.
"Of the remainder, that is to say the bulk of the Mormons, I believe,
indeed I feel convinced, that they will simply ignore the Bill so long
as it ignores them, and that when it is put in force against them, they
will accept the penalty without complaint. In some cases the onus of
proving guilt will no doubt be made heavier by 'passive resistance,'
and where the whole family is solid in throwing obstacles in the way
of espionage, conviction will necessarily be very difficult. As a case
in point may be cited the instance of the Mormon in Salt Lake City,
who married a second wife and successfully defied both the law and
the public to fix his relationship to the lady in question and her
children. She herself was content with saying that her children were
honourable in birth, and that the wedding-ring on her finger was a fact
and not a fiction. But who her husband was neither the law nor the
press could find out for two years, and only then by the confession of
the sinner himself."
I was sitting one day with two Mormon ladies, plural wives, and the
conversation turned upon marriage.
"But," said I, "now that you have experienced the disadvantages of
plurality, shall you advise your daughters to follow your example?"
"No," said both promptly, "I shall not advise them one way or the
other. They must make their own choice, just as I did."
"Choice, I am afraid, is hardly a choice though. Plurality, I fear, is
too nearly a religious duty to leave much option with girls."
"Nonsense," said the elder of the two, "I was just as free to choose my
husband as you were to choose your wife. I married for love."
"And do you really believe," broke in the other, "that any woman in
the world would marry a man she did not like from a sense of religious
duty!"
"Yes," said I, regardless of the fair speaker's scorn, "I thought
plenty of women had done so. More than that, thousands have renounced
marriage with men whom they loved and taken the veil, for Heaven's
sake."
"Very true," was the reply, "a woman may renounce marriage and become a
nun as a religious duty. But the same motive would never have persuaded
that woman to marry against her inclinations. There is all the
difference in the world between the two. Any woman will tell you that."
"Then you mean to say," I persisted, "that you and your friends
consider that you are voluntary agents when you go into plurality? that
you do so entirely of your own accord and of your own free choice?"
"Certainly I do," was the reply. "You may not believe us, of course,
but that I cannot help. All I can say to you is, that if I had the last
seven years of my life to live over again, I should do exactly what I
did seven years ago."
"And what was that?" I asked.
"Refuse to marry a Gentile, to please my friends, and marry a
polygamist to please myself. I had two offers from unmarried men,
either of which my family were very anxious I should accept. But I did
not care for either. But when my husband, who had already two wives,
proposed to me, I accepted him, in spite of my friends' protests. And I
would marry him again if the choice came over again."
"Then yours must surely be exceptional cases, for I cannot bring myself
to believe that those who have been 'first' wives would ever consent to
their husband's re-marriage, if their past could be recalled."
"But I was his first wife," said the elder lady, "and my husband's
second wife was his first love. And if my past were recalled as you
put it, I would give my consent just as willingly as I did twelve
years ago." "Perhaps," said she, laughing, "you will call mine an
'exceptional' case too. But if you go through the Mormons individually,
I am afraid you will find that the 'exceptional' cases are very large."
"And how about the minority?" I asked, "the wives whose hearts have
been broken by plurality?"
"Well," was the reply, "there are plenty of unhappy wives. But this
is surely not peculiar to polygamy, is it? There are plenty of women
who find they have made a mistake. But is it not the same in monogamy?
And yet, though our poor women can get divorces with no trouble, and
at an expense of only ten dollars, and are certain of a competence
after divorce, and of re-marriage if they choose, they do not do it.
There is no greater disgrace attaching to divorce here than in Europe.
Indeed allowances are made for the special trials of plurality, and
mere unhappiness is in itself quite sufficient for a woman to get a
divorce. Yet divorce is very rare indeed, not one-tenth as common as in
Massachusetts, for instance."
"There are bad men amongst us just as there are everywhere," continued
the other lady, "and a bad Mormon is the worst man there can be. But we
are not the only people that have bad husbands among them."
And so it went on. I was met at every point by assurances as sincere
as tone of voice and language could make them appear. Eventually I
scrambled out of the subject as best I could, covering my retreat with
the remark,--
"Well, my only justification in saying that I do not believe you, is
this, that if I said I did, no one would believe me."
Of this much, however, I am convinced, that whatever may have been
true thirty years ago--and there has not been a single trustworthy
book written about Mormonism since 1862--it is not true to-day that
the Church interferes with the domestic relations of the people. When
there is a divorce the Church takes care that the man does not turn his
wife adrift without provision. But as far as I have been able to learn,
the authorities do not meddle in any other way between man and woman,
so long, of course, as neither is a scandal to the community. When a
scandal arises the Church takes prompt notice of it, and the offender,
if incorrigible, is next heard of as "apostatizing," or, in other
words, being turned out of Mormonism as unfit to live in it. But once
married into polygamy, religion is all-powerful in reconciling women
to the sacrifices they have to make, precisely, I suppose, in the same
way that religion reconciles the nun to the sacrifices which her Church
accepts from her.
Practical Plurality, then, is a very dull affair. I was disappointed
in it. I had expected to see men with long whips, sitting on fences,
swearing at their gangs of wives at work in the fields. I expected
every now and then to hear of drunken saints beating seven or eight
wives all at once, and perhaps even to have seen the unusual spectacle
of a house full of women and children rushing screaming into the street
with one intoxicated husband and father in pursuit. Everywhere else
in the world wife-beating is a pastime more or less indulged in coram
publico. In London, at any rate, men so arrange their chastisements
that you can hear the screams from the street and see the wife run out
of the front door on to the pavement. In Salt Lake City therefore, it
seemed only reasonable to suppose that the amount of the screaming
would be in proportion to the number of the wives, and that eventually
ill-used families would be seen pouring simultaneously out of several
doors, and scattering over the premises with hideous ululation. Where
are the aged apostles who have so often been described as going about
in their swallow-tail coats courting each other's daughters? Where
are the "girl-hunting elders" and "ogling bishops"? Where are the
families of one man and ten wives to be found taking the air together
that pictures have so often shown us? Of course there are anomalies,
and very objectionable they are. Thus one young man has married his
half-aunt, another his half-sister, and three sisters have wedded the
same man; but these instances are all "historical," so to speak, and
have been so often trotted out by anti-Mormon book-makers, that they
are hardly worth repeating. Nor does it appear to me to be of any force
to begin raking to-day into the old suspicions as to what Mormons dead
and gone used to do.
What is polygamy like to-day? That is the question. Polygamy to-day,
then, has settled down into the most matter-of-fact system that is
possible for such exceptional domestic arrangements. In the first
place, it is not compulsory, and some of the leading saints are
monogamous. About one-fourth of married Mormons are polygamous, and of
these something less than three per cent are under forty years of age.
The bill of 1862 making polygamy penal effected little or no difference
in the annual average of plural marriages, but since 1877 there has
been a very sensible decrease.
These facts, then, seem to prove first that polygamy, though accepted
as a doctrine of the Church, is not generally acted upon--and why?
For the best of reasons. Either that the men cannot afford to keep
up more than one establishment, or that they are too happy with one
wife to care to marry a second, or that the first wife refuses to
allow any increase of the household--all of which reasons show that
polygamy is controlled by prudential and domestic considerations, and
is not the indiscriminate "debauchery" that so many of the public
believe it to be. It is also evident that the younger Mormons are not
so active in marrying as the elder men were at their age, for ten
years ago the proportion of polygamous Mormons under forty years of
age was much greater, which may mean that the inaction of Congress was
gradually working towards the end which the action of '62 thwarted.
By legislating against polygamy, plural marriages increased--1863
to 1866 being as busy years in the Endowment House as any that ever
preceded them--while by letting polygamy severely alone they have been
decreasing.
Polygamy in fact, by the relaxation of the regime, now that Brigham
Young's personal government has ceased, has taken its place as an
ordinary civil institution, entailing serious responsibilities upon
those who choose to enter into it, and not carrying with it such
promises of temporal advantage as at one time were reserved for the
plurally wedded. There is not the same enthusiasm about it that there
was, owing probably to the diffusion among the people of a better
sense of the position of women and of the opinions of the world with
regard to polygamy. Under the administration of President Taylor there
has been a marked disinclination in the Church to interfere with the
domestic relations of the community, except, as I have said before,
when reprimand or punishment seemed to be called for; and it is
reasonable therefore to argue that the material decline in the number
of plural marriages between 1878 and 1882 would have continued, the
proportion of young enthusiasts have gone on decreasing and, as the
elders died out, the total of polygamists become annually less. Such, I
would contend, is the reasonable inference from the facts I have given.
Polygamy, as a problem, reminds me of a hedgehog. But as the hedgehog
may not be familiar to my American readers, let me explain. The
hedgehog, then, is a small animal with a very elastic skin, closely
set all over with strong sharp spines. A rural life is all its
joy. In habits and character it assimilates somewhat to the Mormon
peasant, being inoffensive, useful, industrious, prolific, and largely
frugivorous. But when hunted it is otherwise. For the hedgehog, if
closely pursued, takes hold of its ears with its hind paws and, tucking
its nose into the middle of its stomach, rolls itself into a perfect
ball. The spines then stand out straight and in every direction
equally. Nor, thus defended, does the hedgehog shun the public eye.
On the contrary, it lies out in the full sunlight, in the middle of
the sidewalk or the dusty high-road, a challenge to the inquisitive
attention of every passing dog. And you can no more keep a dog from
going out of its way to reconnoitre the queer-looking object than you
can keep needles away from loadstones. They do not all behave in the
same way to it, though. The mutton-headed dogs sit down by it and
contemplate it vacantly, and go away after a bit in a kind of brown
study. The silly ones smell it too close, and go off down the road in a
streak of dust and yelp. The experienced dogs sniff at it and trot on.
"Only that hedgehog again!" they say. The malicious prick their noses
and lose their temper, and then prick their noses worse and lose their
tempers more. The puppy barks at it remotely, receding every time by
the recoil of its own bark, till it barks itself backwards into the
opposite ditch. But the hedgehog lies perfectly still, as round and
as spiny as ever, in the middle of the high-road. All the dogs are
much the same to it. Some roll it a little one way, and some roll it a
little the other. It gets dusty or it gets wet. But there it lies as
inscrutable, puzzling, and odious to passing dogs as ever. By-and-by
when it is dark, and everybody has got tired of poking it and sniffing
it and wondering at it, the hedgehog will quietly unroll itself and
creep away to some secluded spot betwixt orchard and corn-field, and
remote from the highways of men and their dogs.
I am particularly led to this moralizing because a Mormon has just been
enumerating, at my request, some of the more extraordinary anomalies
that he knows of in recent polygamy. I took notes of a few, and they
seem to me sufficiently puzzling to justify a place in these pages.
A young and very pretty girl, in "the upper ten" of Mormonism, married
a young man of her own class, but stipulated before marriage that he
should marry a second wife as soon as he could afford to do so.
A young couple were engaged, but quarrelled, and the lover out of pique
married another lady. Two years later his first love, having refused
other offers in the mean time, married him as his second wife.
A man having married a second wife to please himself, married a third
to please his first. "She was getting old, she said, and wanted a
younger woman to help her about the house."
A couple about to be married made an agreement between themselves that
the husband should not marry again unless it was one of the relatives
of the first wife. The ladies selected have refused, and the husband
remains true to his promise.
The belle of the settlement, a Gentile, refused monogamist offers of
marriage, and married a Mormon who had two wives already.
A girl, distracted between her love for her suitor and her love for her
mother, compromised in her affections by stipulating that he should
marry both her mother and herself, which he did.
A girl, a Gentile, bitterly opposed at first to polygamy, married a
polygamist at the solicitation of his first wife, her great friend.
Two girls were great friends, and one of them, getting engaged to a man
(by no means of prepossessing appearance), persuaded her friend to get
engaged to him too, and he married them both on the same day.
These are enough. Moreover, they are not isolated cases, and I believe
I am right in saying that I can give a second instance, of recent
date, of nearly all of them. Nor are these anonymous fictions like the
"victims" of anti-Mormon writers. I have names for each of them. One of
them tells me she could name "scores" of the same kind.
It appears to me, therefore, that the women of Utah have shaken
somewhat the modern theories of the conjugal relation, and--with all
one's innate aversion to a system which is capable of such odious
abnormalisms--a most interesting and baffling problem for study. It is,
as I said, a regular hedgehog of a problem. If you could only catch
hold of it by the nose or the tail, you could scrunch it up easily. But
it has spines all over. It is at once provocative and unapproachable.
I remember once in India giving a tame monkey a lump of sugar inside
a corked bottle. The monkey was of an inquiring kind, and it nearly
killed it. Sometimes, in an impulse of disgust, it would throw the
bottle away, out of its own reach, and then be distracted till it was
given back to it. At others it would sit with a countenance of the
most intense dejection, contemplating the bottled sugar, and then,
as if pulling itself together for another effort at solution, would
sternly take up the problem afresh, and gaze into it. It would tilt
it up one way and try to drink the sugar through the cork, and then,
suddenly reversing it, try to catch it as it fell out at the bottom.
Under the impression that it could capture it by a surprise it kept
rapping its teeth against the glass in futile bites, and, warming to
the pursuit of the revolving lump, used to tie itself into regular
knots round the bottle. Fits of the most ludicrous melancholy would
alternate with these spasms of furious speculation, and how the matter
would have ended it is impossible to say. But the monkey one night got
loose and took the bottle with it. And it has always been a delight to
me to think that whole forestfuls of monkeys have by this time puzzled
themselves into fits over the great Problem of Bottled Sugar. What
profound theories those long-tailed philosophers must have evolved!
What polemical acrimony that bottle must have provoked! And what a
Confucius the original monkey must have become! A single morning with
such a Sanhedrim discussing such a matter would surely have satiated
even a Swift with satire.
Taking then polygamy to be the bottle, and the Gentile to be the
monkey, it appears to me that the only alternatives in solution are
these: Either smash the whole thing up altogether, or else fall back
upon that easy-going old doctrine of wise men, that "morality" is after
all a matter of mere geography.
An Oriental legend shows us Allah sitting in casual conversation with a
man. A cockroach comes along, and Allah stamps on it. "What did you do
that for?" asks the human, looking at the ruined insect. "Because I am
God Almighty," was the reply.
Now, polygamy can be smashed flat if the States choose to show their
power to do so. But no man who takes a part in that demolition must
suppose that in so doing he will be accepted by the community as
rescuing them from degradation. If left alone, polygamy will die out.
Mormons deny this, but I feel sure that they know they are wrong when
they deny it, for nothing but a perpetual miracle of loaves and fishes
will make polygamy and families of forty possible when population and
food-supply come to talk the position over seriously between them. The
expense of plurality will before long prohibit plurality.
"The fashionable milliner" is the most formidable adversary that the
system has yet encountered. A twenty-dollar bonnet is a staggering
argument against it. When women were contented with sunshades, and
made them for themselves, the husband of many wives could afford to be
lavish, and to indulge his household in a diversity of headgear. But
that old serpent, the fashionable milliner, has got over the garden
wall, and Lilith [1] and Eve are no longer content with primitive
garments of home manufacture.
No. Polygamy will before long be impossible, except to the rich; and in
an agricultural community, restricted in area, and further restricted
by the scarcity of water, there can never be many rich men. As it is,
the cost of plurality was on several occasions referred to by Mormons
whom I met during my tour, and I know one man who has for three years
postponed his second marriage, as he does not consider that his
means justify it; while I fancy it will not be disputed by any one
who has inquired into polygamy that, as a general rule, prudential
considerations control the system. Polygamy, then, I sincerely believe,
carries its own antidote with it, and if left alone will rapidly cure
itself. In the mean time the community that practises it does not
consider itself "degraded," and those who take part in smashing it up
must not think it does.
The Mormons are a peasant people, with many of the faults of peasant
life, but with many of the best human virtues as well. They are
conspicuously industrious, honest, and sober.
There is, of course, nothing whatever in common between Oriental
polygamy and Mormon plurality. The main object, and the main result
of the two systems are so widely diverse, that it is hardly necessary
even to refer to the hundred other points of difference which make
comparison between the two utterly absurd.
Yet the comparison is often made in order to prove the Mormons
"degraded," and it is a great pity that such superficial and stupid
arguments should be far more effective ones are at hand. Polygamy,
though difficult to handle, is very vulnerable. The hedgehog, after
all, will have to unroll some time or another. But to assault polygamy
because the Mormons are "Turks" or "debauched Mahometans," or the other
things which silly people call them, is monstrous.
The women have complicated the problem by multiplying instances of
eccentric "affection." But with it all they persist in believing that
they have retained a most exalted estimate of womanly honour. The men,
again, have inextricably entangled all recognized ideas of matrimonial
responsibilities. Yet they have not lost any of the manliness which
characterizes the pioneers of the West.
Their social anomalies are deplorable, but they are not desperate.
Education and the influx of outsiders must infallibly do their work,
and any attempt to rob these men and women of the fruits of their
astonishing industry and of the peaceful enjoyment of the soil which
they have conquered for the United States from the most warlike tribes
among the Indians, and from the most malignant type of desert, is not
only not statesmanship, but it is not humanity.
Are the women of Utah happy? No; not in the monogamous acceptation
of the word "happy." In polygamy the highest happiness of woman is
contentment. But on the other hand her greatest unhappiness is only
discontent. She has not the opportunity on the one hand of rising to
the raptures of perfect love. On the other, she is spared the bitter,
killing anguish of "jealousy" and of infidelity.
But contentment is not happiness. It is its negative, and often has
its source in mere resignation to sorrow. It is the lame sister of
happiness, the deaf-mute in the family of joy. It lives neither in
the background nor foreground of enjoyment, but always in the middle
distance. Tender in all things, it never becomes real happiness by
concentration; having to fill no deep heart-pools, it trickles over
vast surfaces. It goes through life smiling but seldom laughing.
Now, in many philosophies we are taught that this same contentment
is the perfect form of happiness. But humanity is always at war
with philosophy. And I for one will never believe that perpetual
placidity is the highest experience of natures which are capable of
suffering the raptures of joy and of grief. I had rather live humanly,
travelling alternately over sunlit hills and gloomy valleys, than
exist philosophically on the level prairies of monotonous contentment.
Holding, then, the opinion that it is a nobler life to have sounded the
deeps and measured the heights of human emotions than to have floated
in shallows continually, I contend that polygamy is wrong in itself and
a cardinal crime against the possibilities of a woman's heart. A plural
wife can never know the utmost happiness possible for a woman. They
confess this. And by this confession the practice stands damned.
Physically, Mormon plurality appears to me to promise much of the
success which Plato dreamed of, and Utah about the best nursery for
his soldiers that he could have found. Look at the urchins that go
clattering about the roads, perched two together on the bare backs of
horses, and only a bit of rope by way of bridle. Look at the rosy,
demure little girls that will be their wives some day. Take note of
their fathers' daily lives, healthy outdoor work. Go into their homes
and see the mothers at their work. For in Utah servants get sometimes
as much as six dollars a week (and their board and lodging as well
of course), and most households therefore go without this expensive
luxury. And then as you walk home through one of their rural towns
along the tree-shaded streets, with water purling along beside you
as you walk, and the clear breeze from the hills blowing the perfume
of flowers across your path in gusts, with the cottage homes, half
smothered in blossoming fruit-trees, on either hand, and a perpetual
succession gardens,--then I say, come back and sit down, if you can, to
call this people "licentious," "impure," "degraded."
The Mormons themselves refuse to believe that polygamy is the real
objection against them, and it will be found impossible to convince
them that the Edmunds bill is really what it purports to be, a crusade
against their domestic arrangements only. There are some among them who
thoroughly understand the "political" aspect of the case, and are aware
that "the reorganization of Utah" would give very enviable pickings to
the friends of the Commission. Others, have made up their minds that
behind this generous anti-polygamy sentiment is mean sectarian envy,
and that this is only one more of those amiable efforts of narrow
Christians to crush a detested and flourishing sect.
Jealousy, in fact, is the Mormons' explanation of the Edmunds bill. The
Gentiles, they say, are hankering after the good things of Utah, and
hope by one cry after another to persecute the Mormons out of them. But
it is far more curious that the jealousy of their own sex should be
suggested by Mormon women as the cause of their participation in the
clamour against polygamy. Yet so it is; the Gentile women are, they
say, "jealous" of a community where every woman has a husband! It is a
perplexing suggestion, and so thoroughly reverses all rational course
of argument, that I wish it had never been seriously put forward.
Imagine the ladies of the Eastern States who have made themselves
conspicuous in this campaign, who have fought and bled to rescue their
poor sisters from slavery, to free them from the grasp of Mormon
Bluebeards--imagine, I say, these ladies being told by the sisters for
whom they are fighting, that they ought to be ashamed of themselves for
being envious of the women in polygamy! Instead of being thanked for
helping to strike the fetters of plurality off their suffering sisters,
they are met with the retort that they ought to try being wives and
mothers themselves before they come worrying those who have tried it
and are content! They are requested not to meddle with "what they
don't understand," and are threatened with a counter-crusade against
the polyandry of Washington, New York, and other cities! But even more
staggering is the fact that Mormon women base their indignation against
their persecuting saviours on woman's rights, the very ground upon
which those saviours have based their crusade! The advocates of woman's
rights are a very strong party in Utah; and their publications use the
very same arguments that strong-minded women have made so terrible
to newspaper editors in Europe, and members of Parliament. Thus the
Woman's Exponent--with "The Rights of the Women of All Nations" for
its motto--publishes continually signed letters in which plural wives
affirm their contentment with their lot, and in one of its issues is a
leading article, headed "True Charity," and signed Mary Ellen Kimball,
in which the women of Mormondom are reminded that they ought to pray
for poor benighted Mr. Edmunds and all who think like him! Then follows
a letter from a Gentile, addressed to "the truthful pure-hearted,
intelligent, Christian women" of Utah, and after this an article,
"Hints on Marriage," signed "Lillie Freeze." But for a sentence or two
it might be an article by a Gentile in a Gentile "lady's paper," for it
speaks of "courtship" and "lovers," and has the quotation, "two souls
with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one," and all the
other orthodox pretty things about true love and married bliss. Yet the
writer is speaking of polygamy! In the middle of this article written
"for love's sweet sake," and as womanly and pure as ever words written
by woman, comes this paragraph:--
"In proportion as the power of evil increases, a disregard for the
sacred institution of marriage also increases among the youth, and
contempt for the marriage obligation increases among the married until
this most sacred relationship will be overwhelmed by disunion and
strife, and only among the despised Latter-Day Saints will the true
foundation of social happiness and prosperity be found upon the earth;
but in order to realize this state we must be guided by principles
more perfect than those which have wrought such dissolution. God has
revealed a plan for establishing a new order of society which will
elevate and benefit all mankind who embrace it. The nations that fight
against it are working out their own destruction, for their house
is built upon the sand, and one of the corner-stones in the doomed
structure is already loosened through their disregard and dishonour of
the institution of marriage."
Now what is to be done with women who not only declare they are happy
in polygamy, but persist in trying to improve their monogamous sisters?
How is the missionary going to begin, for instance, with Lillie Freeze?
If the Commission deals leniently with them, they will offer only
a passive resistance to the law. But if there is any appearance of
outrage, General Sherman may have some work to do, and it will be
work more worthy of disciplined troops than mere Indian fighting.
There would be abundance of that too, but the Mormons are themselves
sufficient to test the calibre of any troops in the world. For they are
orderly, solid in their adherence to the Church, and trained during
their youth and early manhood to a rough, mountain-frontier life.
They are in fact very superior "Boers," and Utah is a very superior
Transvaal, strategically. Mormonism is not the wind-and-rain inflated
pumpkin the world at a distance believes; it is good firm pumpkin to
the very core. Nor are the Indians a picturesque fiction. They are an
ugly reality, and under proper guidance a very formidable one. In the
mean time there is no talk of war, and the Sword of Laban is lying
quietly in its sheath. For one thing, the commission has given no
"cause" for war; for another, the present hierarchy of the Church are
men of peace.
Such, then, as I view it, is the position in Utah at the present time.
Mormonism has taken up, in the phrase of diplomatic history, "an
attitude of observation," and the future is "in the hands of the Lord
God of Israel."
Footnotes:
1. By the way, it is curious that it should be charged against the
Mormons that they have made Adam a polygamist. It is not a Mormon
invention at all. For, as is well known, legends far older than Moses'
writings declare that Eve married into plurality, and that Lilith was
the "first wife" of our great progenitor.