COULD THE MORMONS FIGHT?
An unfulfilled prophecy--Had Brigham Young been still
alive?--The hierarchy of Mormonism--The fighting Apostle and his
colleagues--Plurality a revelation--Rajpoot infanticide: how it was
stamped out--Would the Mormons submit to the same process?--Their
fighting capabilities--Boer and Mormon: an analogy between the
Drakensberg and the Wasatch ranges--The Puritan fanaticism of the
Saints--Awaiting the fulness of time and of prophecy.
"I SAY, as the Lord lives, we are bound to become a sovereign State
in the Union or an independent nation by ourselves. I am still, and
still will be Governor of this Territory, to the constant chagrin of
my enemies, and twenty-six years shall not pass away before the Elders
of this Church will be as much thought of as kings on their thrones."
These were the words of Brigham Young on the last day of August, 1856.
And the Bill was passed in 1882.
Had Brigham Young been alive then, that prophecy would assuredly have
been fulfilled, for the coincidence of recent legislation with the date
he fixed, would have sufficed to convince him that the opportunity for
a display of the temporal power of his Church which he had foretold,
had arrived. Once before with similar exactness Brigham Young fixed a
momentous date.
He was standing in 1847 upon the site of the Temple, when suddenly, as
if under a momentary impulse, he turned to those who were with him and
said, "And now, if they will only let us alone for ten years, we will
not ask them for any odds."
Exactly ten years later, to the very day, and almost to the very hour
of the day, the news came of the despatch of a Federal army against
Salt Lake City. Brigham Young called his people together--and what a
nation they were compared to the fugitive crowd that had stood round
him in 1847!--and simply reminding them of his words uttered ten years
before, waited for their response. And as if they had only one voice
among them all, the vast assemblage shouted, "No odds."
And then and there he sent them into Echo canyon--and the Federal army
knows the rest.
Had he been alive to-day, that scene would probably have been repeated.
But Brigham Young is not alive. And his mantle has not fallen upon
any of the Elders of the Church. They are men of caution, and the
policy of Mormonism to-day is to temporize and to wait. All the States
are "United" in earnest against them. Brigham Young always taught
the people to reverence prophecy, but he taught them also to help to
fulfil it. But nowadays Mormons are told to stand by and see how the
Lord will work for them. And thus waiting, the Gentiles are gradually
creeping up to them. Every year sees new influences at work to destroy
the isolation of the Church, but the leaders originate no counteracting
influences. Their defences are being sapped, but no counter-mines
are run. As Gentile vigour grows aggressive, Mormonism seems to be
contracting its frontiers. There is no Buonaparte mind to compel
obedience. Mahomet is dead, and Ali, "the Lion of Allah," is dead, and
the Caliphate is now in commission.
President Taylor is a self-reliant and courageous man, but for a ruler
he listens too much to counsel. Though not afraid of responsibility,
it does not sit upon him as one born to the ermine. Brigham Young was
a natural king. President Taylor only suffices for an interregnum. Yet
now, if ever, Mormonism needs a master-spirit. Nothing demoralizes like
inaction. Men begin to look at things "from both sides," to compromise
with convictions, to discredit enthusiasm. This is just what they are
doing now. At one of the most eventful points of their history, they
find the voices of the Tabernacle giving forth uncertain sounds. Their
Urim and Thummim is dim; the Shekinah is flickering; their oracles
stutter. They are told to obey the laws and yet to live their religion.
In other words, to eat their cake and have it; to let go and hold
tight--anything that is contradictory, irreconcilable, and impossible.
Meanwhile, wealth and interests in outside schemes have raised up in
the Church a body of men of considerable temporal influence, who it
is generally supposed "outside" are half-hearted. The Gentiles lay
great stress on this. But no one should be deceived as to the real
importance of this "half-heartedness." In the first place, a single
word from President Taylor would extinguish the influence of these
men politically and religously, at once and for ever. A single speech
in the Tabernacle would reduce them to mere ciphers in Mormonism,
and the Church would really, therefore, lose nothing more by their
defection than the men themselves. But as a matter of fact they are
not half-hearted. I know the men whom the outside world refers to
personally, and I am certain therefore of my ground when I say that
Mormonism will find them, in any hour of need, ready to throw all their
temporal influence on to the side of the Church. The people need not
be apprehensive, for there is no treason in their camp. There may be
"Trimmers," but was there ever a movement that had no Trimmers?
The hierarchy in Utah stands as follows:--
President--John Taylor. Counsellors to the President--Joseph F.
Smith, G. Q. Cannon. Apostles--Wilford Woodruff, Franklin Richards,
C. C. Rich, Brigham Young, Moses Thatcher, M. Lyman, J. H. Smith, A.
Carrington, Erastus Snow, Lorenzo Snow, S. P. Teasdel, and J. Grant.
Counsellors to the Apostles--John W. Young, D. H. Wells.
Now in the present critical situation of affairs the personnel of this
governing body is of some interest. President Taylor I have already
spoken of. He is considered by all as a good head during an uneventful
period, and that he is doing sound, practical work in a general
administrative way is beyond doubt. But it is his misfortune to come
immediately after Brigham Young. It is not often in history that an
Aurungzebe follows an Akbar. But his counsellors, Apostles Cannon and
Joseph Smith, are emphatically strong men. The former is a staunch
Mormon, and a man of the world as well--perhaps the only Mormon who
is--while the latter is "the fighting Apostle," a man of both brains
and courage. Had he been ten years older he would probably have been
President now. Of the remainder the men of conspicuous mark are Moses
Thatcher, an admirable speaker and an able man, Merion Lyman, a very
sound thinker and spirited in counsel, and D. H. Wells--perhaps the
"strongest" unit in the whole hierarchy. He has made as much history
as any man in the Church, and as one of its best soldiers and one of
its shrewdest heads might have been expected to hold a higher rank
than he does. He was one of the Counsellors of Brigham Young, but on
the reconstruction of the governing body, accepted the position of
Counsellor to the Twelve. These five men, should the contingency for
any decisive policy arise, will certainly lead the Mormon Church.
I was speaking one day to a Mormon, a husband of several wives, and
was candidly explaining my aversion to that co-operative system of
matrimony which the world calls "polygamy," but which the Saints prefer
should be called "plurality." When I had finished, much to my own
satisfaction (for I thought I had proved polygamy wrong), my companion
knocked all my arguments, premises and conclusion together, into a
cocked hat, by saying,--
"You are unprejudiced--I grant that; and you take higher ground
for your condemnation of us than most do. But," said he, "you have
never referred to the fact that we Mormons believe plurality to be a
revelation from God. But we do believe it, and until that belief is
overthrown angels from Heaven cannot convince us. You spoke of the
power and authority of the United States. But what is that to the power
and authority of God? The United States cannot do more than exterminate
us for not abandoning plurality. But God can, and will, damn us to all
eternity if we do abandon it."
Now what argument but force can avail against such an attitude as this?
The better the Mormon, the harder he freezes to his religion--and
part of his religion is polygamy--so important a part, indeed, that
the whole future of the Saints is based upon it. The "Kingdom of
God" is arranged with reference to it. The hopes of Mormons of glory
and happiness in eternity depend upon it, and in this life men and
women are perpetually exhorted to live up to it. It is pure nonsense
therefore--so at least it seems to me--to request the Mormons to give
up plurality, and keep the rest. You might just as well cut off all
a man's limbs, and then tell him to get along "like a good and loyal
citizen," with only a stomach.
Force of course will avail, in the end, just as it did in India when
the Government determined to stamp out female infanticide among the
Rajpoots. There, the procedure was from necessity inquisitorial (for
the natives of the proscribed districts combined to prevent detection),
but it was eventually effectual. It was simply this. Whenever a family
was suspected of killing its female infants, a special staff of police
was quartered upon the village in which that family lived, at the
expense of the village, and maintained a constant personal watch over
each of the suspected wives during the period immediately preceding
childbirth. Nothing could have been so offensive to native sentiment
as such procedure, but nothing else was of any use. In the end the
suspects got wearied of the perpetual tyranny of supervision, and their
neighbours wearied of paying for the police, and infanticide as a
crime common to a whole community ceased after a few years to exist in
India. Now if the worst came to the worst, something of the same kind
is within the resources of the United States. Every polygamous family
in the Territory might be brought under direct police supervision at
the cost of their neighbours, and punishment rigidly follow every
conviction. This would stamp out polygamy in time.
But it would be a long time, a very long time, and I would hesitate
to affirm that Mormon endurance and submission would be equal to such
a severe and such a protracted ordeal. There is nothing in their past
history that leads me to look upon them as a people exceptionally
tolerant of ill-usage.
The infanticidal families in India were, it is true, of a fighting
caste and clan, but the suspected families were only a few hundreds
in number. They could not, like the Mormons, rely upon a strength of
twenty-five thousand adult males, an admirable strategic position,
and the help, if necessary, of twenty thousand picked "warriors" from
the surrounding Indian tribes; and it is mere waste of words to say
that the consciousness of strength has often got a great deal to do
with influencing the action of men who are subjected to violence. And
I doubt myself, looking to the recent history of England in Africa,
and Russia in Central Asia, whether the United States, when they
come to consider Mormon potentialities for resistance, will think it
worth while to resort to violence in vindication of a sentiment. The
war between the North and the South is not a case in point at all.
There was more than a mere "sentiment" went to the bringing on of
that war. Remember, I do not say that the Mormons entertain the idea
of having to fight the United States. I only say that they would not
be afraid to do it, in defence of their religion, if circumstances
compelled it. And I am only arguing from nature when I say that those
"circumstances" arrive at very different stages of suffering with
different individuals. The worm, for instance, does not turn till
it is trodden on. The grizzly bear turns if you sneeze at it. And I
am only quoting history when I say that thirty thousand determined
men, well armed, with their base of military supplies at their backs,
could defend a position of great strategical strength for--well, a
very considerable time against an army only ten times as numerous as
themselves--especially if that army had to defend a thousand miles of
communications against unlimited Indians.
It was my privilege when on the editorial staff of the Daily Telegraph
in London to tell the country in the leading columns of that paper what
I thought of the chances of success against the Boers of the Transvaal.
I said that one Boer on his own mountains was worth five British
soldiers, and that any army that went against those fanatical puritans
with less than ten to one in numbers, would find "the sword of the
Lord and of Gideon" too strong for them, and the Drakensberg range an
impregnable frontier. As an Englishman I regret that my words were so
miserably fulfilled, and England, after sacrificing a great number of
men and officers, decided that it was not worth while "for a sentiment"
to continue the war.
The points of resemblance between the Mormons and the Boers are rather
curious.
The Boers of the Transvaal, though of the same stock as the great
majority of the inhabitants of British Africa, were averse to the forms
of government that had satisfied the rest. So they migrated, after some
popular disturbances, and settled in another district where they hoped
to enjoy the imperium in imperio on which they had set their longings.
But British colonies again came up with them, and after a fight with
the troops, the Boers again migrated, and with their long caravans of
ox and mule waggons "trekked" away to the farthest inhabitable corner
of the continent. Here for a considerable time they enjoyed the life
they had sought for, established a capital, had their own governor,
whipped or coaxed the surrounding native tribes into docility, and,
after a fashion, throve. But yet once more the "thin red line" of
British possession crept up to them, and the Boers, being now at bay,
and having nowhere else to "trek" to, fought.
They were not exactly trained soldiers, but merely a territorial
militia, accustomed, however, to warfare with native tribes, and, by
the constant use of the rifle in hunting game, capital marksmen. So
they declared war against Great Britain, these three or four thousand
Boers, and having worked themselves up into the belief that they were
fighting for their religion, they unsheathed "the sword of the Lord
and of Gideon," threatened to call in the natives, and holding their
mountain passes, defied the British troops to force them. Nor without
success. For every time the troops went at them, they beat them, giving
chapter and verse out of the Bible for each whipping, and eventually
concluded their extraordinary military operations by an honourable
peace, and a long proclamation of pious thanksgiving "to the Lord God
omnipotent." To-day, therefore, Queen Victoria is "suzerain" of the
Transvaal, and the Boers govern themselves by a territorial government.
To their neighbours they are known as very pious, simple, and stubborn
people; very shrewd in making a bargain; very honest when it is
made; a pastoral and agricultural community, with strong objections
to "Gentiles," who, by the way, are never tired of reviling them,
especially with regard to alleged eccentricities in domestic relations.
Am I not right, then, in saying that the resemblance between the Boers
and the Mormons is "curious"?
When I speak of the Mormons as being prepared to accept the worst that
the commission under the Edmunds bill may do, it should be understood
that this readiness to suffer does not arise from any misconception of
their own strength. The Mormons are thoroughly aware of it; indeed, the
figures which I have given (25,000 adult males and 20,000 Indians) are
not accepted by all of them as representing their full numbers. They
fully understand also the capabilities of their position for defence,
and are not backward to appreciate the advantages which the length of
the Federal communications would give them for protracting a campaign.
Under the circumstances, therefore, the argument of a leading Mormon,
that "if the United States really believe the people of Utah to be the
desperate fanatics they call them, any action on their part that tends
to exasperate such fanatics is foolhardy," may be accepted as quite
seriously meant. For the Mormons, if bigoted about anything at all,
are so on this point--that they cannot be crushed. As the elect of
God, specially appointed by Him to prepare places of worship and keep
up the fires of a religion which is very soon to consume all others,
they cannot, they say, be moved until the final fulfilment of prophecy.
The Jews have still to be gathered together, and "the nations from
the north country" whose coming, according to the Bible, is to be so
terrible, are to find the Mormons, "the children of Ephraim," ready
prepared with such rites and such tabernacles that the "sons of Levi,"
the Jews, can perform their old worship, and, thus refreshed, continue
their progress to the Holy Land. "And their prophets shall come in
remembrance before the Lord, and they shall smite the rocks, and the
ice shall flow down at their presence, and a highway shall be cast up
in the midst of the great deep. And they shall come forth, and their
enemies shall become a prey unto them, and the everlasting hills shall
tremble at their presence." For this time, these men and women among
whom I have lived are actually waiting!
Of course, we ordinary Christians, whose religion sits lightly upon
us, cannot, without some effort, understand the stern faith with which
the Mormons cling to their translations of Old Testament prophecy. Nor
is it easy to credit the fierce earnestness with which, for instance,
the Saints look forward to the accomplishment of the promise that they
shall eventually possess Jackson County, Missouri. But if this spirit
of intense superstition is not properly taken into account by those
who try to make the Mormons alter their beliefs, they run the risk of
underestimating the seriousness of their attempt. If, on the other
hand, it is properly taken into account, the difficulty of forcing this
people to abandon their creeds will be at once seen to be very grave.
Except, perhaps, the Kurdish outbreak on the Persian frontier some
three years ago, there has been no problem like the Mormon one
presented to the consideration of modern Europe. In the case of the
Kurds, two nations, Turkey and Persia, were within an ace of war, in
consequence of the insurgents pretending that a point of religion
was involved, and popular fanaticism very nearly slipping beyond the
control of their respective governments.
When living at a distance from Salt Lake City, it is very difficult
indeed to recognize the truth of the situation. Until I went there I
always found that though in a general way the obstacles to a speedy
settlement were admitted, yet that somehow or another there was always
the afterthought that Mormonism was only an inflated imposture, and
that it would collapse at the first touch of law. It was allowed on all
hands that the position was a peculiar one, but it was hinted also that
it was an absurd one. "No doubt," it was argued, "the Mormons are an
obstinate set of men, but after all they have got common sense. When
they see that everybody is against them, that polygamy is contrary to
the spirit of the times, that all the future of Utah depends upon their
abandonment of it, that resistance is worse than senseless," and so
on, they will give in. Let opinion as to the "bigotry" of the Mormons
or their capacity for mischief be what it might, there was always a
qualifying addendum to the effect that "nothing would come of all this
fuss." The Mormons, in fact, were supposed to be "bluffing", and it was
taken for granted therefore that they had a weak hand.
But in Salt Lake City it is impossible to speak in this way. A
Mormon--a man of absolute honesty of speech--in conversation on this
subject declared to me that he could not abandon plurality without
apostatizing, and rather than do it, he would burn his house and
business premises down, go away to the Mexicans, die, if necessary.
Now, that man may any day be put to the very test he spoke of. He will
have to abandon polygamy, or else, if his adversaries are malicious,
spend virtually the whole of his life in jail. Which will he do? And
what will all the others of his way of thinking do? Will they defy the
law, or will they try to break it down by its own weight--that is to
say, load the files with such numbers of cases, and fill the prisons
with such numbers of convicts that the machinery will clog and break
down? The heroic alternatives of burning down their houses, going
off to Mexico, and dying will not be offered them. Their choice will
simply lie between monogamy (or celibacy) and prison, two very prosaic
things--and one or the other they must accept. Such at any rate is the
opinion of the world.
But the Mormons, as I have already shown, do not admit this simplicity
in the solution at all. From the point of view of the law-makers,
they allow that the option before them is very commonplace. But the
law-makers, they say, have omitted to take into consideration certain
facts which complicate the solution. For though, as I have said,
the majority may be expected to accept such qualified martyrdom as
is offered, and "await the Lord's time", yet there can be no doubt
whatever that strict Mormons will not acquiesce in the suppression of
their doctrines, and among so many who are strict is it reasonable to
expect that there will be no violent advisers? Their teachers have
perpetually taught them, and their leaders assured them that prophecy
had found its fulfilment in the establishment of the Church in Utah.
Here, and nowhere else, the Saints are to await "the fulness of time"
when the whole world shall yield obedience to their government, and
reverence to their religion. The Rocky Mountains, and no other, are
"the mountains" of Holy Writ where "Zion" was to be built; and they,
the Mormons, are the remnant of Ephraim that are to welcome and pass
on the returning Jews. How, then, can the Saints reconcile themselves
to another exodus? Mexico, they say, would welcome them; but if the
richest lands in the world, and all the privileges they ask for were
offered them, they could not stultify revelation and prophecy by
accepting the offer. Moreover, they have been assured times without
number that they should never be "driven" again, and times without
number that their enemies "shall not prevail against them." To many,
to most, this, of course, now points to some interposition of Divine
Providence in their favour. The crisis may seem dangerous, and the
opposition to them overwhelming. But they are convinced--it is no
mere matter of opinion with them--that if they are only patient under
persecution and keep on living their religion, the persecution will
cease, and the triumph of their faith be fulfilled. Europe and America,
they believe, are about to be involved in terrific disasters. Wars of
unprecedented magnitude are to be waged, and natural catastrophes,
unparalleled in history, are to occur. But, in the midst of all
this shock of thrones, this convulsion of the elements, Zion on the
Mountains is to be at peace and in prosperity. It will be the one still
harbour in all the ocean of troubles, and to it, as to their final
haven, all the elect of all the nations are to gather. The prudent,
therefore, looking forward to this apocalypse of general ruin, counsel
submission to the passing storm, endurance under legal penalties, and
fidelity to their doctrine.
But all are not prudent. Every Gethsemane has its Peter. And from that
memorable garden they draw a lesson. The Saviour, they say, meant
fighting, but when he saw that resistance to such odds as came against
him could have only ended in the massacre of his disciples, he went to
prison.
That Brigham Young, if alive, would have decided upon a military
demonstration, the sons of Zeruiah are very ready to believe, for they
say that, even if the worst were to happen and they had eventually to
capitulate under unreasonable odds, their position would be preferable
to that which they hold to-day. To-day they lie, the whole community
together, under the ban of civil disabilities, as a criminal class, at
the mercy of police--a proscribed people. In the future, if compelled
to surrender their arms, they would be in the position of prisoners on
parole, under the honourable conditions of a military capitulation. The
worst, therefore, that could happen would, they say, be better than
what is.
Such, at any rate, they assert, would have been the argument of Brigham
Young, and Gentiles even confess that if the late President were still
at the head of the Church the temptation for "a great bluff" would be
irresistible.