CHAPTER XV,

MORMONDOM.

WE had been presented at court, and favourably received; asked to call again; admitted to State secrets of the presidency. From this moment our position in the city was secured. Mormon seats in the theatre were placed at our disposal; the director of immigration, the presiding bishop, Colonel Hunter -a grim, weather-beaten Indian fighter-and his coadjutors carried us off to see the reception of the bull-train at the Elephant Corral; we were offered a team to take us to the Lake, which we refused only because we had already accepted the loan of one from a Gentile merchant; presents of peaches and invitations to lunch, dinner, and supper, came pouring in upon us from all sides. In a single morning we were visited by four of the Apostles and nine other leading members of the Church. Ecclesiastical dignitaries sat upon our single chair and wash-hand-stand; and one bed groaned under the weight of George A. Smith, "Church historian," * while the other bore Æsop's load-the peaches he had brought. These growers of fruit from standard trees think but small things of our English wall-fruit, "baked on one side, and frozen on the other," as they say. There is a mellowness about the Mormon peaches that would drive our gardeners to despair.

One of our callers was Captain Hooper, the Utah delegate to Congress. He is an adept at the Western plan of getting out of a fix by telling you a story. When we laughingly alluded to his lack of wives, and the absurdity of a monogamist representing Utah, he said that the people at Washington all believed • Succeeded Brigham as "Trustee in Trust " in 1874, and died in 1875.

that Utah had sent them a polygamist. There is a rule that no one with the entry shall take more than one lady to the White House receptions. A member of Congress was urged by three ladies to take them with him. He, as men do, said, "The thing is impossible "-and did it. Presenting himself with the bevy at the door, the usher stopped him: "Can't pass; only one friend admitted with each member." "Suppose, sir, that I'm the delegate from Utah territory?" said the Congress-man. "Oh, pass in, sir-pass in," was the instant answer of the usher. The story reminds me of poor Browne's "family" ticket to his lecture at Salt Lake City: "Admit the bearer and one wife." Hooper is said to be under pressure at this moment on the question of polygamy, for he is a favourite with the Prophet, who cannot, however, with consistency promote him to office in the Church on account of a saying of his own: "A man with one wife is of less account before God than a man with no wives at all."*

Our best opportunity of judging of the Mormon ladies was at the theatre, which we attended regularly, sitting now in Elder Stenhouse's "family" seats, now with General Wells. Here we saw the wives of the leading Churchmen of the city; in their houses, we saw only those they chose to show us: in no case but that of the Clawson family did we meet in society all the wives. We noticed at once that the leading ladies were all alike-full of taste, full of sense, but full, at the same time, of a kind of unconscious melancholy. Everywhere, as you looked round the house, you met the sad eye which I had seen but once before-among the Shakers at New Lebanon. The women here, knowing no other state, seem to think themselves as happy as the day is long: their eye alone is there to show the Gentile that they are, if the expression may be allowed, unhappy without knowing it. That these Mormon women love their religion and reverence its priests is but a consequence of its being "their religion"-the system in the midst of which they have been brought up. Who of us is there that does not set up some idol in his heart round which he weaves all that he has of poetry and devotion in his character?-art, hero-worship, patriotism Captain Hooper has since married other wives.

are forms of this great tendency. That the Mormon girls, who are educated as highly as those of any country in the worldwho, like all American girls, are allowed to wander where they please who are certain of protection in any of the fifty Gentile houses in the city, and absolutely safe in Camp Douglas at the distance of two miles from the city wall-all consent deliberately to enter on polygamy, shows clearly enough that they can, as a rule, have no dislike to it beyond such a feeling as public opinion will speedily overcome.

Discussion of the institution of plural marriage in Salt Lake City is fruitless; all that can be done is to observe. In assaulting the Mormon citadel, you strike against the air. "Polygamy degrades the woman," you begin. "Morally or socially?" says the Mormon. "Socially." "Granted," is the reply, "and that is a most desirable consummation. By socially lowering, it morally raises the woman. It makes her a servant, but it makes her pure and good."

It is always well to remember that if we have one argument against polygamy which from our Gentile point of view is unanswerable, it is not necessary that we should rack our brains for others. All our modern experience is favourable to ranking woman as man's equal; polygamy assumes that she shall be his servant-loving, faithful, cheerful, willing, but still a

servant.

The opposite poles upon the women question are Utah polygamy and Wyoming female suffrage.

CHAPTER XVI.

WESTERN EDITORS.

THE attack upon Mormondom has been systematized, and is conducted with military skill, by trench and parallel. The New England papers having called for "facts" whereon to base their homilies, General Connor, of Fenian fame, set up the Union Vedette in Salt Lake City, and publishes on Saturdays a sheet expressly intended for Eastern reading. The mantle of the Sangamo Journal has fallen on the Vedette, and John C. Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this source it is that come the whole of the paragraphs against Brigham and all Mormondom which fill the Eastern papers, and find their way to London. The editor has to cram his paper with peppery leaders, well-spiced telegrams, stinging "facts." Every week there must be something that can be used and quoted against Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quotations are in turn quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circumstances, even telegrams can be made to take a flavour. In to-day's Vedette we have one from St. Joseph, describing how above one thousand "of these dirty, filthy dupes of the Great Salt Lake iniquity" are now squatting round the packet depôt, awaiting transport. Another from Chicago tells us that the seven thousand European Mormons who have this year passed up the Missouri river "are of the lowest and most ignorant classes." The leader is directed against Mormons in general, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one of the Mormon papers, and expostmaster of the territory. He has already had cause to fear the Vedette, as it was through the exertions of its editor that he lost his office. This matter is referred to in the leader of to-day: "When we found our letters scattered about the

streets in fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest postmaster appointed in place of the editor of the Telegraph-an organ where even carrots, pumpkins, and potatoes are current funds-directed by a clique of foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, and who never drew a loyal breath since they came to Utah." The Mormon tax frauds, and the Mormon police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and the writer concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest "for quietly indulging in a glass of wine in a private room with a friend."

Attacks such as these make one understand the suspiciousness of the Mormon leaders, and the slowness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a joke if it concerns the Church. Artemus Ward once wrote to Stenhouse, "Ef you can't take a joke, you'll be darned, and you oughter;" but the jest at which he can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber Kimball said to me one day: "They're all alike. There was came here to write a book, and we thought better of him than of most. I showed him more kindness than I ever showed a man before or since, and then he called me a 'hoary reprobate.' I would advise him not to pass this way next time."

The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday morning, at the tabernacle, I remarked that the Prophet's daughter, Zina, had on the same dress as she had worn the evening before at the theatre, in playing "Mrs. Musket" in the farce of " My Husband's Ghost." It was a black silk gown, with a vandyke flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my assertion in the most emphatic way, although he could not have known for certain that I was wrong.

The Mormons will talk freely of their own suspiciousness. They say that the coldness with which travellers are usually received at Salt Lake City is the consequence of years of total misrepresentation. They forget that they are arguing in a circle, and that this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the result of their reserve.

The news and advertisements are even more amusing than the leaders in the Vedette. A paragraph tells us, for instance,