AT MONROE.
"Schooling" in the Mormon districts--Innocence as to whisky,
but connoisseurs in water--"What do you think of that water,
sir?"--Gentile dependents on Mormon charity--The one-eyed
rooster--Notice to All!
SITTING at the door next morning, I saw a very trimly-dressed damsel
of twenty or thereabouts, coming briskly along under the trees, which
there, as in every other Mormon settlement, shade the side-walk. She
was the schoolmistress, I learned, and very soon her scholars began
to pass along. I had thus an opportunity of observing the curious,
happy-go-lucky style in which "schooling" is carried on, and I was
sorry to see it, for Mormonism stands urgently in need of more
education, and it is pure folly to spend half the revenue of the
Territory annually in a school establishment, if the children and
their parents are permitted to suppose that education is voluntary
and a matter of individual whim. Some of the leading members of the
Church are conspicuous defaulters in this matter, and do their families
a gross wrong by setting "the chores" and education before them as
being of equal importance. Even in the highest class of the community
children go to school or stay away almost as they like, and provided a
little boy or girl has the shrewdness to see that he or she can relieve
the father or mother from trouble by being at home to run errands and
do little jobs about the house, they can, I regret to think, regulate
the amount of their own schooling as they please. I know very well
that Utah compares very favourably, on paper, with the greater part
of America, but I have compiled and examined too many educational
statistics in my time to have any faith in them.
But in the matter of abstinence from strong drink and stimulants, the
leaders of the Church set an admirable example, and I found it very
difficult most of the time, and quite impossible part of it, to keep my
whisky flask replenished.
My system of arriving at the truth as to the existence of spirit stores
in any particular settlement, was to grumble and complain at having
no whisky, and to exaggerate my regrets at the absence of beer. The
courtesy of my hosts was thus challenged, and of the sincerity of the
efforts made to gratify my barbaric tastes, I could have no doubt
whatever. In most cases they were quite ignorant of even the cost
of liquor, and on one occasion a man started off with a five-dollar
piece I had given him to get me "five dollars' worth of whisky in this
bottle," pointing to my flask. I explained to him that I only wanted
the flask replenished, and that there would be change to bring back. He
did not get any at all, however.
On one occasion the Bishop brought in, in evident triumph, two bottles
of beer. On another I went clandestinely with a Mormon, after dark, and
drank some whisky "as a friend," and not as a customer, with another
Mormon, who "generally kept a bottle on hand" for secret consumption.
That they would both have been ashamed for their neighbours to know
what they were about, I am perfectly convinced. On a third occasion an
official brought me half a pint of whisky, and the price was a dollar.
Now it is quite impossible for me, who have thus made personal
experiment, to have any doubt as to the prevailing sobriety of these
people. I put them repeatedly to the severest test that you can
apply to a hospitable man, by asking point-blank for ardent spirits.
Sometimes, in an off-hand way, I would give money and the flask to a
lad, and ask him to "run across to the store and get me a little whisky
or brandy." He would take both and meander round in an aimless sort of
way. But I might almost as well have asked him to go and buy me a few
birds-of-paradise or advance sheets of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica."
The father or a neighbour might perhaps suggest a "likely" place to get
some stimulant, but, as a rule, the quest was unconditionally abandoned
as hopeless.
The Elders of the Church set a strict example themselves, discouraging,
by their own abstinence, indulgence even in tea and coffee. You are
asked in a settlement whether you will have tea or coffee, just as in
England you would be asked whether you would drink ale or claret. A
strong man takes a cup of tea as a lady in Europe might take a glass of
sherry, as justified by unusual exercise and fatigue. Being a Londoner,
I entertain a most wholesome suspicion of water as a drink, and I
reverence fresh milk. In rural Utah, milk being so abundant, the people
think little of it, but they pride themselves on their water.
"What do you think of that water, sir?" was a question that puzzled me
to answer at first, for I am not a connoisseur in drinking-water. If
it had been a claret, I might have made a pretence of criticism. But
water! Or if they had let me wash in it, I would have told them whether
I thought it "hard" or "soft." But to pass an opinion on a particular
tumbler of water, as if it were a special brand laid down by my host
for his own drinking, completely puzzled me. I can no more tell waters
apart than I can tell Chinamen. Of course I can discriminate between
the outcome of the sea and of sulphur springs. But for the rest, it
seems to me that they only differ in their degrees of cleanliness, or,
as scientific men say, to "the properties which they hold in solution,"
that is mud. And mud, I take it, is always pretty much the same.
So at first when my host would suddenly turn to me with, "What do you
think of that water, sir?" I made the mistake of supposing it might be
one of the extraordinary aqueous novelties for which this territory
is so remarkable--hot-geyser water or petrifying water, or something
else of the kind--and would smack my lips critically and venture on a
suggestion of "lime," or "soda," or "alkali." But my host was always
certain to be down with, "Oh, no; I assure you. That is reckoned the
best water in the county!"
I soon discovered, however, that the right thing to say was that I
preferred it, "on the whole," to the water at the last place. This was
invariably satisfactory--unless, of course, there was a resident of
"the last place" present, when an argument would ensue. These people,
in fact, look upon their drinking-water just as on the continent they
look upon their vins ordinaires, or in England upon their local brews,
and to the last I could not help being delighted at the manner in
which a jug of water and tumblers were handed about among a party of
fatigued and thirsty travellers. I always took my share becomingly, but
sometimes, I must confess, with silent forebodings.
For in some places there are springs which petrify, by coating with
lime, any substance they flow over, and I did not anticipate with any
gratification having my throat lined with cement, or my stomach faced
with building-stone.
"Who are those children?" said I to my host at Munroe, pointing to
two ragged little shoeless waifs that were standing in his yard and
evidently waiting to be taken notice of. Instead of replying, my host
turned towards them.
"Well, Jimmy," said he, "what is it to-day?"
The wistful eyes looking out from under the tattered, broad-brimmed
hats, brightened into intelligence.
"Another chicken for mother," said both together, promptly; and then,
as if suddenly overtaken by a sense of their audacity, the forlorn
little lads dropped their eyes and stood there, holding each other's
hands, as picturesque and pathetic a pair as any beggar children in
Italy. In the full sunlight, but half shaded by the immense brims of
those wonderfully ancient hats, the urchins were irresistibly artistic,
and if met with anywhere in the Riviera, would have been sure of that
small-change tribute which the romantic tourist pays with such pleasant
punctuality to the picturesque poverty of Southern childhood. But this
was in Utah.
And my host looked at them from under his tilted straw hat. They stood
in front of him as still as sculptors' models, but fingers and toes
kept exchanging little signals of nervous distress.
"All right. Go and get one," said my host suddenly. "Take the young
rooster that's blind of one eye."
He had to shout the last instructions in a rapid crescendo as the
youngsters had sprung off together at the word "go," like twin shafts
from those double-arrowed bows of the old Manchurian archers. Three
minutes later and a most woful scrawking heralded the approach of
the captors and the captive. The young rooster, though blind of one
eye, saw quite enough of the situation to make him apprehensive, but
the younger urchin had him tight under his arm, and, still under the
exciting influences of the chase and capture, the boys stood once more
before my host, with panting bodies, flushed cheeks, and tufts of
yellow hair sprouting out through crevices of those wondrous old hats,
which had evidently just seen service in the capture. And the rooster,
feeling, perhaps, that he was now before the final court of appeal,
scrawked as if machinery had got loose inside him and he couldn't stop
it.
"How's your (scraw-w-w-k) mother?"
She's (scraw-w-w-k)--and she's (scraw-w-w-k) nothing to eat all
yesterday." (Scraw-w-k.)
"Go on home, then."
And away down the middle of the road scudded the little fellows in a
confusion of dust and scrawk.
"Who are those children?" I asked again, thinking I had chanced on that
unknown thing, a pauper Mormon.
"Oh," said my host, "he's a bad lot--an outsider--who came in here as a
loafer, and deserted his wife. She's very ill and pretty nigh starving.
Ay, she would starve, too, if her boys there didn't come round regular,
begging of us. But loafers know very well that 'those----Mormons' won't
let anybody go hungry. Ay, and they act as if they knew it, too."
In other settlements there are exactly such similar cases, but I would
draw the attention of my readers--I wish I could draw the attention
of the whole nation to it--to the following notice which stands to
this day with all the force of a regular by-law in these Mormon
settlements:--
"NOTICE TO ALL.
"If there are any persons in this city who are destitute of food,
let them be who they may, if they will let their wants be known to
me, privately or otherwise, I will see that they are furnished with
food and lodging until they can provide for themselves. The bishops
of every ward are to see that there are no persons going hungry.
"(Signed by the Presiding Bishop.)"
Now it may be mere "sentiment" on my part, but I confess that this
"Notice to All," in the simplicity of its wording, in the nobility of
its spirit, reads to me very beautifully. And what a contrast to turn
from this text of a universal charity, that is no respecter of persons,
to the infinite meanness of those who can write, as in the Salt Lake
Tribune, of the whole community of Mormons as the villainous spawn of
polygamy!"
It is a recognized law among the Mormons that no tramp shall pass by
one of their settlements hungry; if it is at nightfall, he is to be
housed. Towards the Indians their policy is one of enlightened and
Christian humanity. For their own people their charity commences from
the first. Emigrated to this country by the voluntary donations which
maintain the "Perpetual Emigration Fund," each new arrival is met
with immediate care, and being passed on to his location, finds (as
I have described in another chapter) a system of mutual kindliness
prevailing which starts him in life. If sick, he is cared for. If he
dies, his family is provided for. All this is fact. I have read it in
no books, heard it from no hoodwinking elders. My informants are lads
just arrived in Salt Lake City--within an hour or two of their arrival,
in fact; young men just settling down in their first log hut in rural
settlements: grown men now themselves engaged in the neighbourly duty
of assisting new-comers.
I have met and talked to those men--Germans, Scandinavians,
Britishers--in their own homes here in Utah, and have positively
assured myself of the fact I state, that charity, unquestioning,
simple-hearted charity, is one of the secrets of the strength of this
wonderful fabric of Mormonism. The Mormons are, more nearly than any
other community in the world on such a scale, one family. Every man
knows all the rest of his neighbours with an intimacy and a neighbourly
interest that is the result of reciprocal good services in the past.
This is their bond of union. In India there is "the village community"
which moves, though in another arc, on the same plane as the Mormon
settlement system. There, to touch one man's crop is to inflame the
whole clan with the sense of a common injury. Here it is much the same.
And as it is between the different individuals in a settlement, so it
is between the different settlements in the territory. A brutal act,
like that eviction of the Mormon postmaster at Park City the other
day, disturbs the whole of Mormonism with apprehensions of impending
violence. A libel directed at a man or woman in Salt Lake City makes a
hundred thousand personal enemies in Utah. Now, with what petard will
you hoist such a rock?
Induce these Mormons to hate one another "for all the world like
Christians," as George Eliot said, and they can be snapped as easily
as the philosopher's faggots when once they were unbundled. But in
the meantime abuse of individuals or "persecution" of a class simply
cements the whole body together more firmly than ever. Mutual charity
is one of the bonds of Mormon union. It is the secret of this "oneness"
which makes the Salt Lake Tribune yelp so.