out having their low natures excited by erotic desires; but shame, eternal shame, on the clergymen who, imitating the moral outlaws of our cities, invariably associate Mormon wives and Mormon homes with the thought of prostitution and promiscuity.

Four years ago I concluded my "Utah and its People" with words that the rapid progress toward centralization of power render more and more pertinent and impressive. They were as follows:

Polygamy in Utah is the consecration under religious obligation of the sexual relations, yet the Edmunds act assumes that it is identical with bigamy, or the betrayal and desertion of a woman through false pretenses!

This act not only brands men as criminal for following out their connections, in which woman's consent is a pre-requisite, but disfranchises even those who contracted plural marriage before Congress declared it to be a crime.

But in what does their crime consist? It is time to cease indulging in mere assumption, in appeals to passion and religious bigotry. In New York there is no law on the statute-book defining fornication as a crime, and all our pulpits are silent! You may, if unmarried, enter into sexual relations with a dozen women, so long as you do not represent them to be wives. Call them your harlots, your concubines, anything but wife, and you are guilty of no criminality.

Would it follow that if the miserable fanatic, the Mormon, could be induced to strike down the sacramental relation in which he holds marriage, if he should cease to give guarantees to both the woman and society, to stand by the results of this relation, he would be less open to clerical rebuke? If he adopted the suggestion of the Salt Lake Tribune, and recognized prostitutes as social missionaries, basing his sexual relations merely on animal passion, following New York rather than Biblical precedents, and lived in open and admitted fornication, there would be no law especially drafted to meet his case, the pulpit would be estopped from censure, and Christian society compelled to look elsewhere for its sacrificial goat!

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If polygamy be barbarism, our superior civilization will crush it out. But right or wrong, be careful how you deny to even a deluded" people the right of self-government, brand their children bastards, and turn them over for relief to the sense of equity possessed by a board of politicians. We tolerate the Shakers in seeking to prohibit and prevent marriage-certainly necessary to social existence. Let us endeavor to tolerate the men who regulate marriage on a religious belief, and who invariably discountenance and condemn every plural marriage by an apostate as wanting in that consecration which can alone sanctify. A crusade against those who refuse to recognize civil marriage, as the Catholic, is full as legitimate, and would be attempted, were their property centralized in a Territory.

We have learned to tolerate the religious heretic-in law, at least but not the social heretic, and the Mormon problem brings

before us a test which will try our boasted liberality to the utmost. When we, as a people, go two thousand miles to deny the right of self-government, because the letter, not the spirit, of law permits it; when we deprive citizens of the rights of franchise for acts of which those interested do not complain, but indorse, and which involves no moral criminality; when we do this to a people upon whose moral character the only blot is in the non-Mormon portion, we strike a blow at the American idea of liberty and toleration that might well arouse Thomas Jefferson from his tomb.

Whatever we may think of polygamy as a social system, let us be careful how we act, and not fashion a handle for an axe which may one day strike nearer home when wielded by other passions. Are there none of our statesmen who can rise above the fogs of prejudice and see the danger coercive measures must lead to? If moralists choose to ignore the Golden Rule, a statesman should not be blind to the peril involved in following a course mapped out by a few political adventurers in Utah. Leave to clergymen the honor of glorying over the possible apostacy of a few thousand Mormons from a faith which has kept them from profligacy and vice, or in their emancipation from moral control, and view the subject in a far broader sense. The Mormons point to the prophecy of Joseph Smith, that the time was not far distant when they alone would be the defenders of the great principle of religious liberty; shall the fulfillment of this prophecy come through the act of the representatives of a Republic founded by Jefferson and his colleagues?

If the Mormon home is not the childless home of the Eastern capitalist, nor the home of the factory operative, in which the belt of the mill connects with the cradle and weaves human lives into manufactured fabric, it is none the less a home consecrated by family love and sanctified by religious observances, where the mother's devotion guides the feet of loving children.

You know the Golden Rule, apply it in this case, or answer why not!

T

CHAPTER VI.

THE MORAL CRUSADERS.

HE theory of republican government is that it is with and by the consent of the governed. The practice, as prevailing in the Territories, is to govern without the consent of the governed, where certain social heretics are not even tolerated, their lives only being spared; and where loyalty is supposed to consist in open denunciation of men who furnish nearly all of the taxes and comparatively none of crime.

On the other hand we have seen that the alleged "theocracy" has mortally offended our tradesmen-as true to the instincts of his class to-day in America, as was his more ancient Pharasaic brother in Jerusalem-by inaugurating co-operation in both production and distribution; has revolted the tender consciences of the lawyers in Congress as well as out-unable to see beyond the text of what is written as ever were their Levitic prototypes-in dispensing with legal fees and their inestimable privilege of fomenting social discord; has shocked the moral sense of our great army of theologasters by requiring every member of the "priesthood," from the President down to the humblest Deacon, to labor for a living; and have blasted the hopes of political barnacles and sycophants by forbidding any man to hold office in its ecclesiastical organization without the consent and expressed approval of those among whom and for whom he is to exercise the functions of his office.

Could difference be more radical? The government, located twenty-five hundred miles distant, encroaching upon monarchical privileges, appoints the refuse of political conventions, or defeated candidates who have failed to secure support at home, without reference to the feelings or wishes of those to be governed. The "Theocracy," in precept and practice, making general acceptance so prominent a feature that no Mormon could be found mean enough to solicit an appointment to exercise authority over an unwilling people; where even the thearchs have no right to foist themselves or others into any position of honor or profit.

What the Mormons are we have seen; let us now glance at the

character of some of the past officials dumped upon Utah, and the acts of some of the present incumbents.

I have before me a circular issued in May, 1877, and signed by A. Milton Musser, "Mormon" Elder, a gentleman whom I have reason to know to be the peer in moral character and general attainments of any man in Utah of my acquaintance, and worthy of recognition in any assemblage of ladies and gentlemen as in every respect an honorable and truthful man. He said:

The red hot feeling now kindled against us is entirely unwarranted. I speak from the record, having been identified with the "Mormons" since 1846. I know that the excitement and consequent prejudice periodically fanned to blood heat against our citizens is made to promote the personal interests of very bad men. We have had, and now have in Utah, such frauds as Eliza Pinkston, J. Madison Wells, and Returning Boards by the score. To prove this I need but state that out of the appointments made by ex-President Grant, during the eight years of his incumbency, to places of trust in Utah, he was obliged to remove forty-five of them because of their dishonest, unlawful and rascally acts. These recalls were Governors, Acting-Governors, Secretaries, Judges, Land-Officers, District Attorneys, Marshalls, Special Mail Agents, and the like.

Let us glance at some of the “ petty vices" of these official regenerators of Mormondom. The Judge through whose misrepresentation President Buchanan was induced to send an Army to Utah, leaving his wife and children behind him, brought a courtesan with him west, who sat by his side on the judicial bench! Another official, soon after his arrival, made improper advances to a respectable lady, whose sons, it was said, overtook him in his flight to the East, and for the gross insult to their mother deprived him of virility. Another, who received the appointment of Governor, with his son became the joint father of a waif, whose sorrowing mother on oath could not say whether the Governor was father or grandfather! Another Governor was not long there till he was discovered in a drunken debauch with an imported harlot, both of whom were in a state of primitive nudity! Still another—who was so greatly exercised at the Mormons because of their religious marriages that he never lost an opportunity to denounce them was so incautious as to permit the embarrassing discovery of hair pins in his bed while his wife was thousands of miles away; a discovery which so digusted his Gentile hostess that she quitted the place without notice.

Again, another with his carpet-bag arrived to overshadow Utah with his stately presence. He was a leader in a bible-class on Sundays. Week days he varied the duties of his position by stump

speeches in mining camps against the vileness of plural marriage. For unlawful and questionable acts his gubernatorial career came to a sudden end. The Utah report says: "On the way to the Pacific slope this spotless anti-' Mormon' scripture reader for a whole night contested the right of possession to a sleeping berth on a Pullman car with a woman not his wife, and neither being willing to surrender to the other, a joint occupancy was maintained the entire night."

Another, afterward convicted of malfeasance in office and removed, incited the only election riot Utah had ever know while grossly intoxicated, but produced the Governor to give sworn testimony that he was sober, when it was a matter of common notoriety on the streets that if sober it was an abnormal condition.

Without extending the list to an unnecessary length, I ask attention to the following extract:

We once had a judicial luminary that would not keep in his family's employ a servant-girl or washerwoman except on special personal considerations. Some years ago his wife and other ladies, of the same faith, sent East a piteous petition to the lady members of the same church for a Christmas gift of five dollars each, for the erection of a church in Salt Lake City, looking to the "amelioration of the Mormon women." Soon after the petition was made public one of the principle "lady" singers was fined for keeping a house of prostitution.

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Many of our past officials have in every possible manner, by their judicial, official, and other acts, encouraged and screened prostitution and drunkenness. The pimp, harlot and rum-seller would draw on them at sight, and they were ever ready to honor their drafts and aid in crippling the local officers of Salt Lake City, and other places, with writs, injunctions, etc. Once upon a time a Mormon" was sent to the penitentiary for a term of years and fined $300 by a mission judge for openly maintaining two wives and their children. When the Supreme Court of the United States set aside his extrajudicial proceeding, and released the " Mormon," an officer and a harlot rode out in a carriage to open the prison door, and while en route, it is said, they maintained the relation of married people.

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Among the most ardent, but pitiable, would-be regenerators was a man whose ambition centred in subjugating the "Mormons,' freeing Ireland from British rule, drinking whiskey, and making love to a subaltern's wife; while his own wife and children were off on a visit, he took as kindly to the proxy as measles takes to children. The god-fathers of the anti-polygamy bill-a once highly respected government official, now an humbled citizen of Indiana; a man of New York City who free-loved his neighbors' wife and was shot by the outraged husband; and a would-be popular actress—all bitter enemies to our day-light, healthy and beautiful children