MORMON VIRTUES.
Red ants and anti-Mormons--Ignorance of the Mormons among
Gentiles in Salt Lake City--Mormon reverence for the Bible--Their
struggle against drinking-saloons in the city--Conspicuous
piety in the settlements--Their charity--Their sobriety (to
my great inconvenience)--The literature of Mormonism utterly
unreliable--Neglect of the press by the Saints--Explanation of the
wide-spread misrepresentation of Mormonism.
FROM Orderville (after a short tour in the south-west of the Territory)
I returned to Salt Lake City, and during my second sojourn there,
over a month, I saw nothing and learned nothing either from Mormon or
Gentile to induce me to erase a single word I had written during my
previous visit. Indeed, a better acquaintance only strengthened my
first favourable opinions of "the Saints of the Rocky Mountains."
I was walking one day up the City Creek, when I became aware of an aged
man seated on a stone by the roadside. His trousers were turned up to
his knees, and he was nursing one of his legs as if he felt a great
pity for it. As I approached I perceived that he was in trouble--(I
perceived this by his oaths)--and getting still nearer I ventured
to inquire what annoyed him. "Aged person," said I, "what aileth
thee?"--or words to that effect. But there was no response, at least
not worth mentioning. He only bent further over his leg, and I noticed
that his coat had split down the back seam. His cursing accounted for
that. It was sufficient to make any coat split. And then his hat fell
off his head into the dust, in judgment upon him. At this he swore
again, horribly. By this time I had guessed that he had been bitten by
red ants (and they are the shrewdest reptiles at biting that I know
of), so I said, "Bitten by red ants, eh?" At this he exploded with
wrath, and looked up. And such a face! He had a countenance on him like
the ragged edge of despair. His appearance was a calamity. "Red ants,"
said he; "red Indians, red devils, red hell!" and then, relapsing into
the vernacular, he became unintelligibly profane, but ended up with
"this damned Mormon city."
Now here was a man, fairly advanced in years, fairly clothed, fairly
uneducated. As I had never seen him before, he may have been, for all I
know, "the average American" I so often see referred to. Anyhow, there
he was, cursing the Mormons because he had been bitten by red ants! Of
his own stupidity he had gone and stood upon an ants' nest, thrust his
hippopotamus foot into their domicile, overwhelming the nurseries and
the parlours in a common catastrophe, crushing with the same heel the
grandsire ant and the sucking babe at its mother's breast, mashing up
the infirm and the feeble with the eggs in the cells and the household
provisions laid up in the larder--ruining in fact an industrious
community simply by his own weight in butcher's meat. Some of the
survivors promptly attacked the intruding boot, and, running up what
the old man was pleased to call "his blasted pants," had bitten the
legs which they found concealed within them. And for this, "the average
American" cursed the Mormons and their city!
The incident interested me, for, apart from my sympathy with the
ants, I couldn't help thinking what a powerful adversary to Mormonism
this trifling mishap might have created. That man went back to his
hotel (for he was evidently a "visitor") a confirmed anti-Mormon. His
darkest suspicions about polygamy were confirmed. His detestation of
the bestial licentiousness of the Saints was increased a hundred-fold.
He saw at a glance that all he had ever heard about "the Danites" was
quite true, and much more too that he had never heard but could now
easily invent for himself. There was no need for any one to tell him,
after the way he had been treated within a mile of the Tabernacle, of
the infamous debaucheries of Brigham Young with his "Cyprian maids" and
his "cloistered wives." Wasn't it as plain as the sun at noonday that
the Mormons were in league with the red Indians, and went halves in the
proceeds of each other's massacres?
The ant-bitten man was a very typical "Mormon-eater," for such
is the local name of those who revile Mormonism root and branch
because they find intelligent men opposed to polygamy. They are
under the impression, seeing and talking to nobody but each other,
that the United States in a mass, that the whole world, entertain an
unreasoning, fanatical abhorrence of the inhabitants of the Territory,
and share with them their mean parochial jealousy of the Mormon
tradesmen and Mormon farmers who are more thriving than they are
themselves.
Here in Salt Lake City there is the most extraordinary ignorance
of Mormonism that can be imagined. I have actually been assured
by "Gentiles" that the Saints do not believe in the God of the
Bible--that adultery among them is winked at by husbands under a
tacit understanding of reciprocity--that the Mormons as a class
are profane, and drunken, and so forth. Now, if they knew anything
whatever of the Mormons, such statements would be impossible (unless
of course made in wilful malice), for my personal acquaintance with
"the Saints" has shown me that in all classes alike the reverence
for the God of the Bible is formulated not only in their morning and
evening prayers, but in their grace before every meal; that so far
from there being any exceptional familiarity between families, the
very reverse is conspicuous, for so strict is the Mormon etiquette of
social courtesies, that households which in England would be on the
most intimate terms, maintain here a distant formality which impresses
the stranger as being cold; that instead of the Mormons being as a
class profane, they are as a class singularly sober in their language,
and indeed in this respect resemble the Quakers. Now, my opinions are
founded upon facts of personal knowledge and experience.
Of course it will be said of me that as I was a "guest" of Mormons
I was "bound" to speak well of them; that as I was so much among
them I was hoodwinked and "shown the best side of everything," &c.,
&c. Against this argument, always the resource of the gobemouche,
common sense is useless. "Against stupidity the gods themselves are
powerless." But this I can say--that I will defy any really impure
household, monogamous or not, to hoodwink me in the same way--to keep
up from morning to night the same unchanging profession of piety, to
make believe from week to week with such consummate hypocrisy that they
are god-fearing and pure in their lives, and to wear a mask of sobriety
with such uniform success. And I am not speaking of one household only,
but of a score to which I was admitted simply as being a stranger from
whom they need not fear calumny. I do not believe that acting exists
anywhere in such perfection that a whole community can assume, at a few
hours' notice and for the benefit of a passing stranger, the characters
of honest, kind-hearted, simple men and women, and set themselves
patiently to a three months' comedy of pretended purity. Such impostors
do not exist.
The Mormons drunken! Now what, for instance, can be the conclusion of
any honest thinker from this fact--that though I mixed constantly with
Mormons, all of them anxious to show me every hospitality and courtesy,
I was never at any time asked to take a glass of strong drink? If I
wanted a horse to ride or to drive I had a choice at once offered me.
If I wanted some one to go with me to some point of interest, his
time was mine. Yet it never occurred to them to show a courtesy by
suggesting "a drink."
Then, seriously, how can any one have respect for the literature or the
men who, without knowing anything of the lives of Mormons, stigmatize
them as profane, adulterous, and drunken? As a community I know them,
from personal advantages of observation such as no non-Mormon writer
has ever previously possessed, [1] to be at any rate exceptionally
careful in maintaining the appearance of piety and sobriety; and I
leave it to my readers to judge whether such solid hypocrisy as this,
that tries to abolish all swearing and all strong drink both by precept
from the pulpit and example in the household, is not, after all, nearly
as admirable as the real thing itself.
This, at all events, is beyond doubt--that the Mormons have always
struggled hard to prevent the sale of liquor in Salt Lake City, except
under strict regulations and supervision. But the fight has gone
against them. The courts uphold the right of publicans to sell when and
what they choose; and the Mormons, who could at one time boast--and
visitors without number have borne evidence to the fact--that a
drunkard was never to be seen, an oath never to be heard, in the
streets of their city, have now to confess that, thanks to the example
of Gentiles, they have both drunkards and profane men among them. But
the general attitude of the Church towards these delinquents, and
the sorrow that their weakness causes in the family circle, are in
themselves proofs of the sincerity in sobriety which distinguishes the
Mormons. Nor is it any secret that if the Mormons had the power they
would to-morrow close all the saloons and bars, except those under
Church regulation, and then, they say, "we might hope to see the old
days back when we never thought of locking our doors at night, and when
our wives and girls, let them be out ever so late, needed no escort in
the streets."
And having travelled throughout the Mormon settlements, I am at a loss
how to convey to my readers with any brevity the effect which the tour
has had upon me.
I have seen, and spoken to, and lived with, Mormon men and women of
every class, and never in my life in any Christian country, not even
in happy, rural England, have I come in contact with more consistent
piety, sobriety, and neighbourly charity. I say this deliberately.
Without a particle of odious sanctimony these folk are, in their words
and actions, as Christian as I had ever thought to see men and women. A
perpetual spirit of charity seems to possess them, and if the prayers
of simple, devout humanity are ever of any avail, it must surely be
this wonderful Mormon earnestness in appeals to Heaven. I have often
watched Moslems in India praying, and thought then that I had seen
the extremity of devotion, but now that I have seen these people on
their knees in their kitchens at morning and at night, and heard their
old men--men who remember the dark days of the Faith--pour out from
their hearts their gratitude for past mercy, their pleas for future
protection, I find that I have met with even a more striking form
of prayer than I have ever met with before. Equally striking is the
universal reverence and affection with which they, quite unconscious of
the fact that I was "taking notes," spoke of the authorities of their
Church. Fear there was none, but respect and love were everywhere. It
would be a bold man who, in one of these Mormon hamlets, ventured to
repeat the slanders current among Gentiles elsewhere. And it would
indeed be a base man who visited these hard-living, trustful men and
women, and then went away to calumniate them.
But it is a fact, and cannot be challenged, that the only people in
all Utah who libel these Mormons are either those who are ignorant of
them, those who have apostatized (frequently under compulsion) from
the Church, or those, the official clique and their sycophants, who
have been charged with looking forward to a share of the plunder of
the Territorial treasury. On the other hand, I know many Gentiles who,
though like myself they consider polygamy itself detestable, speak of
this people as patterns to themselves in commercial honesty, religious
earnestness, and social charity.
Travelling through the settlements, I found that every one voluntarily
considered his poorer neighbours as a charge upon himself. When a man
arrives there, a stranger and penniless, one helps to get together logs
for his first hut, another to break up a plot of ground. A third lends
him his waggon to draw some firewood from the canyon or hillside; a
fourth gives up some of his time to show him how to bring the water
on to his ground--and so on through all the first requirements of the
forlorn new-comer. Behind them all meanwhile is the Church, in the
person of the presiding Elder of the settlement, who makes him such
advances as are considered necessary. It is a wonderful system, and
as pathetic, to my mind, as any struggle for existence that I have
ever witnessed. But every man who comes among them is another unit of
strength, and let him be only a straight-spoken, fair-dealing fellow,
with his heart in his work, and he finds every one's hand ready to
assist him.
And the first commencement is terribly small. A one-roomed log hut is
planted in a desert of sage-brush "with roots that hold as firm as
original sin," and rocks that are as hard to get rid of as bad habits.
Borrowing a plough here, and a shovel there, the new-comer bungles
through an acre or two of furrows, and digs out a trench. Begging of
one neighbour some fruit-tree cuttings, he sticks the discouraging
twigs into the ground, and by working out some extra time for another
gets some lucerne seed. Then he gets a hen, and then a setting of eggs,
by-and-by a heifer, and a little later, by putting in work or by an
advance from the Church, or with kindly help from a neighbour, he adds
a horse to his stock. Time passes, say a year; his orchard (that is to
be) has several dozen leaves on it, and the ground is all green with
lucerne, the chickens are thriving, and he adds an acre or two more to
the first patch, and his neighbours, seeing him in earnest, are still
ready with their advice and aid. Adobe bricks are gradually piled up
in a corner of the lot, and very soon an extra room or two is built
on to the log hut, and saplings of cotton-wood, or poplar, or locust
are planted in a row before the dwelling: and so on year by year,
conquering a little more of the sage-brush, bringing on the water a
furlong further, adding an outhouse, planting another tree. At the end
of ten years--years of unsparing, untiring labour, but years brightened
with perpetual kindness from neighbours--this man, the penniless
emigrant, invites the wayfarer into his house, has a comfortably
furnished bedroom at his service, oats and fodder for his team, ample
and wholesome food for all. The wife spreads the table with eggs and
ham and chicken, vegetables, pickles, and preserves, milk and cream,
pies and puddings--"Yes, sir, all of our own raising." The dismal
twigs have grown up into pleasant shade-trees, and a flower-garden
brightens the front of the house. In the barn are comfortable, well-fed
stock, horses and cows. This is no fancy picture, but one from life,
and typical of 20,000 others. Each homestead in turn has the same
experience, and it is no wonder, therefore, when the settlement,
properly laid out and organized, grows into municipal existence, that
every one speaks kindly of, and acts kindly towards, his neighbour. A
visitor, till he understands the reason, is surprised at the intimacy
of households. But when he does understand it, ought not his surprise
to give place to admiration?
Not less conspicuous is the uniform sincerity in religion. A school
and meeting-house is to be found in every settlement, even though
there may be only half-a-dozen families, and besides the regular
attendance of the people at weekly services, the private prayers of
each household are as punctual as their meals. In these prayers, after
the ordinary generalities, the head of the house usually prays for
all the authorities of the Church, from the President downwards, for
the local authorities, for the Church as a body, and the missionaries
abroad, for his household and its guest, for the United States, and for
Congress, and for all the world that feels kindly towards Mormonism.
But quite apart from the matter of their prayers, their manner is very
striking, and the scene in a humble house, when a large family meets
for prayer--and half the members, finding no article of furniture
unoccupied for the orthodox position of devotion, drop into attitudes
of natural reverence, kneeling in the middle of the floor--appeals very
strongly to the eye of those accustomed to the stereotyped piety of a
more advanced civilization.
One more conspicuous feature of Mormon life is sobriety. I have been
the guest of some fifty different households, and only once I was
offered even beer. That exception was in a Danish household, where
the wife brewed her own "ol"--an opaque beverage of home-fermented
wheat and home-grown hops--as a curiosity curious, as an "indulgence"
doubtful, as a regular drink impossible. On no other occasion was
anything but tea, coffee, milk, or water offered. And even tea and
coffee, being discouraged by the Church, are but seldom drunk. As a
heathen outsider I deplored my beer, and was grateful for coffee; but
the rest of the household, in almost every instance, drank water.
Tobacco is virtually unused. It is used, but so seldom that it does not
affect my statement. The spittoon, therefore, though in every room, is
behind the door, or in a corner under a piece of furniture. In case
it should be needed, it is there--like the shot-gun upstairs--but its
being called into requisition would be a family event.
No, let their enemies say what they will, the Mormon settlements are
each of them to-day a refutation of the libel that the Mormons are not
sincere in their antipathy to strong drink and tobacco. That individual
Mormons drink and smoke proves nothing, except that they do it. For the
great majority of the Mormons, they are strictly sober. I know it to my
great inconvenience.
Is it possible then that the American people, so generous in their
impulses, so large-hearted in action, have been misled as to the
true character of the Mormon "problem"? At first sight this may seem
impossible. A whole people, it will be said, cannot have been misled.
But I think a general misapprehension is quite within the possibilities.
Whence have the public derived their opinions about Mormonism? From
anti-Mormons only. I have ransacked the literature of the subject,
and yet I really could not tell any one where to go for an impartial
book about Mormonism later in date than Burton's "City of the
Saints," published in 1862. Burton, it is well known, wrote as a man
of wide travel and liberal education--catholic, therefore, on all
matters religious, and generous in his views of ethical and social
obliquities, sympathetic, consistent, and judicial. It is no wonder,
then, that Mormons remember the distinguished traveller, in spite of
his candour, with the utmost kindness. But put Burton on one side,
and I think I can defy any one to name another book about the Mormons
worthy of honest respect. From that truly awful book, "The History
of the Saints," published by one Bennett (even an anti-Mormon has
styled him "the greatest rascal that ever came to the West") in 1842,
down to Stenhouse's in 1873, there is not, to my knowledge, a single
Gentile work before the public that is not utterly unreliable from
its distortion of facts. Yet it is from these books--for there are no
others--that the American public has acquired nearly all its ideas
about the people of Utah.
The Mormons themselves are most foolishly negligent of the power of
the press, and of the immense value in forming public opinion of a
free use of type. They affect to be indifferent to the clamour of the
world, but when this clamour leads to legislative action against them,
they turn round petulantly with the complaint that there is a universal
conspiracy against them. It does not seem to occur to them that their
misfortunes are partly due to their own neglect of the very weapons
which their adversaries have used so diligently, so unscrupulously, and
so successfully.
They do not seem to understand that a public contradiction given to
a public calumny goes some way towards correcting the mischief done,
or that by anticipating malicious versions of events they could as
often as not get an accurate statement before the public, instead of
an inaccurate one. But enterprise in advertisement has been altogether
on the side of the anti-Mormons. The latter never lose an opportunity
of throwing in a bad word, while the Mormons content themselves with
"rounding their shoulders," as they are so fond of saying, and putting
a denial of the libel into the local News. They say they are so
accustomed to abuse that they are beginning not to care about it--which
is the old, stupid self-justification of the apathetic. The fascination
of a self-imposed martyrdom seems too great for them, and, like flies
when they are being wrapped up into parcels by the spider for greater
convenience of transportation to its larder, they sing chastened
canticles about the inevitability of cobwebs and the deplorable
rapacity of spiders.
"I can assure you," said one of them, "it would be of no use trying to
undeceive the public. You cannot make a whistle out of a pig's tail,
you know."
"Nonsense," I replied. "You can--for I have seen a whistle made out of
a pig's tail. And it is in a shop in Chicago to this day!"
It will be understood, then, that the Mormons have made no adequate
efforts either in books or the press to meet their antagonists. They
prefer to allow cases against them to go by default, and content
themselves with privately filing pleas in defence which would have
easily acquitted them had they gone before the public. America,
therefore, hearing only one side of the case, and so much of it, is
certainly not to be blamed for drawing its conclusions from the only
facts before it. It cannot be expected to know that three or four
individuals, all them by their own confession "Mormon-eaters," have
from the first been the purveyors of nearly all the distorted facts it
receives. Seeing the same thing said in many different directions, the
general public naturally conclude that a great number of persons are in
agreement as to the facts.
But the exigencies of journalism which admit, for instance, of the
same correspondent being a local contributor to two or three score
newspapers of widely differing views in politics and religion, are
unknown to them. And they are therefore unaware that the indignation
so widely printed throughout America has its source in the personal
animosity of three or four individuals only who are bitterly sectarian,
and that these men are actually personally ignorant of the country
they live in, have seldom talked to a Mormon, and have never visited
Mormonism outside Salt Lake City. These men write of the "squalid
poverty" of Mormons, of their obscene brutality, of their unceasing
treason towards the United States, of their blasphemous repudiation of
the Bible, without one particle of information on the subject, except
such as they gather from the books and writings of men whom they ought
to know are utterly unworthy of credit, or from the verbal calumnies
of apostates. And what the evidence of apostates is worth history has
long ago told us. I am now stating facts; and I, who have lived among
the Mormons and with them, who have seen them in their homes, rich
and poor; have joined in their worship, public and private; who have
constantly conversed with them, men, women, and children; Who have
visited their out-lying settlements, large and small--as no Gentile
has ever done before me--can assure my readers that every day of my
residence increased my regret at the misrepresentation these people
have suffered.
Footnotes:
1. Except, of course, General Kane.