dience, has never been taken as her fundamental
social truth by any church. Hand- work may have
been called useful ; it has nowhere been treated
by the law as noble. In our old world, the names
of prince and gentleman are given to those w T ho
write and think, not to those who plough and
trench, who throw in the seed and gather up the
sheaves. By noble labour, we mean the work of
judges, statesmen, orators, priests ; no one in
Europe would think of saying that to plant a
tree, to dig a drain, to build a house, to mow a
field, would be noble toil. The Hindoo puts his
labourers into the two lowest castes ; if they are
husbandmen into the third caste, if artisans into
the fourth ; their estate being in either case far
less honourable than that of a warrior, that of
a priest. A sudra s soul and body counts for less
than one hair from a Brahman s head ; for among
the Hindoos, work is regarded as a curse, never



HIGH POLITICS. 287

as a blessing, and the free labourer of Bengal ranks
but one degree higher than a pariah and a slave.
Now and then the Hebrews had glimpses of a
better law : " Seest thou a man skilful in his work,
he shall stand before kings ;" the theory of God
and Nature ; and from this Hebrew source, not
from any dreams of Owen, Fourier, and St. Simon,
the Saints have borrowed their idea, translating it,
not into language only, but into extensive pas
tures and smiling farms. With them, to do any
piece of work is a righteous act ; to be a toiling
and producing man is to be in a state of grace.

What need is there to dwell on the political
value of such a note?



288 NEW AMERICA.



CHAPTER XXVII.

MARRIAGE IN UTAH.

BUT the most singular, the most powerful, of these
three groups of secular notes, even when we study
them from a political point of view only, is that
which defines the conditions of family life, parti
cularly in what it has to say of marriage. Mar
riage lies at the root of society, and the method
of dealing with it marks the spirit of every reli
gious system.

Now the new American church puts marriage
into the very front of man s duties on earth.
Neither man nor woman, says Young, can work out
the will of God alone ; that is to say, all human
beings have a function to discharge on earth the
function of providing tabernacles of the flesh for
immortal spirits now waiting to be born which
cannot be discharged except through that union of
the sexes implied in marriage. To evade that



MARRIAGE IN UTAH. 289

function is, according to Young, to evade the most
sacred of man s obligations. It is to commit sin.
An unwedded man is, in Mormon belief, an im
perfect creature ; like a bird without wings, a body
without soul. Nature is dual ; to complete his
organisation a man must marry a wife. Love, says
Young, is the yearning for a higher state of existence ;
and the passions, properly understood, are the feeders
of our spiritual life.

Looking to this dogma of the duty of wedlock
solely as a source of political power, we should
have to allow it very great weight. What waste
it saves ! In many religious bodies marriage is
simply tolerated, as the lesser form of two dark
evils. Those Essenes from whom we derive so
much, allowed it only to the weak, and on account
of weakness ; they thought it better for a good
man to refrain from marriage; and in the higher
grades of their society the relation of wife and
husband was unknown. Many orders among the
Hindoos practise celibacy. The Greeks had their
Vestal virgins, the Egyptians their anchorites, the
Syrians their ascetics. In the Pagan Olympus,
abstinence was a virtue, praised, if not practised,
by the gods. Hestia and Artemis were honoured
above all the denizens of heaven, because they rose
VOL. i. u



290 XEW AMERICA.

beyond the reach of love ; nay, the idea of mar
riage being a kind of corruption had so far sunk
into the pagan mind as to crop out everywhere
in the common speech. To be unloved was to be
unspotted ; to be single was to be pure. In all
pagan poetry the title of virgin is held to be
higher than that of mother, nobler than that of
wife. Among Christian communities marriage is
a theme of endless disputation ; one church calling
it a sacrament, another calling it a contract ; all
churches considering it optional ; few regarding it
as meritorious ; many denouncing it as a com
promise with the devil. The Greek church en
courages celibacy in a class ; the Latin prohibits
marriage to its priests. The Gothic church may
be said to stand neutral ; but no church in the
world has ever yet come to insist on the duty
of marriage as necessary to the living of a true
Christian life.

On the contrary, every religious body which
has dealt with the topic at all Greek, Armenian,
Coptic, Latin, Abyssinian declares by facts, no
less than by words, that any union of the sexes
in the bands of wedlock is hostile to the highest
conception of a Christian life. Hence the monastic
houses ; hence the celibacy of priests ; institu-



1IA1HIAGE C* FTAH. 291

tions which infect the mind of society, arresting
the growth of many household virtues, poisoning
some of the sources of domestic life. A wifeless
priest is a standing protest against wedded love;
for if it be true that the human affections are a
gnare, leading men away from God, it is surely a
good man s duty to crush them out. A snare is a
snare, a sin a sin, to be avoided equally by the
layman and the priest.

Young has turned the face of his church an
other way. With him marriage is a duty and a
[privilege ; and the elders, being considered examples
I to the people in all good works, are enjoined to
tmarry. A priest and elder must be a husband ;
even among the humbler flock, it is held to be a
jjdisgrace, the sign of an unregeuerated heart, for a
poung man to be found leading a single life.

But the Saints have pushed the doctrine a step
arther ; for, instead of denying to their popes
md priests the consolation of woman s love, they
aicourage them to indulge in a plurality of wives ;
md among their higher clergy the Prophet,
he apostles, and the bishops this indulgence
next to universal Kot to be a pluralist is not
be a good Mormon. My Mend, Captain Hooper,
>ugh he is known to be rich, zealous, insin-

j



292 NEW AMERICA.

uating an admirable representative of Utah in
Congress has never been able to rise high in
the church, on account of his repugnance to taking
another wife. " We look on Hooper," the Apostle
Taylor said to me yesterday at dinner, "as only
half a Mormon ; " at which every one laughed in a
sly, peculiar way. When the merriment, in which
the young ladies joined, had died down, I said
to Hooper, " Here s a great chance for you next
season. Pick out six of the prettiest girls in Salt
Lake City : marry them in a batch ; carry them to
Washington ; and open your season in December
with a ball ! " " Well," said Hooper, " I think that

would take for a time ; but then I am growing to

*

be an old fellow."

Young, who is fond of Hooper, proud of his
talents, and conscious of his services, is said to be
urging him strongly to marry one more wife at
least, so as to cast in his lot finally, whether for
good or evil, with the polygamous church. If
Hooper yields it will be from a sentiment of duty
and fidelity towards his chief.

Every priest of the higher grades in Salt Lake
Valley has a plural household ; the number of his
mates varying with the wealth and character of the
elder. No apostle has less than three wives.



MARRIAGE IX UTAH. 293

Of the marriages of Brigliam Young, Heber
Kimball, and Daniel Wells, the three members of
what is here called the First Presidency, no accounts
are kept in the public office. It is the fashion of
every pious old lady in this community, who may
have lost her husband by death, to implore the
bishop of her ward to take measures for getting
her sealed to one of these three Presidents. Young
is, of course, the favourite of such widows ; and
it is said that he never makes a journey from the
Beehive without being called upon to indulge one
of these poor creatures in her wish. Hence, a
great many women hold the nominal rank of his
wife whom he has scarcely ever seen, and with
whom he has never held the relations of a husband,
as we in Europe should understand the term.

The actual wives of Brigham Young, the women
who live in his houses in the Beehive, in the Lion
House, in the White Cottage who are the mothers
of his children, are twelve, or about twelve, in
number. The queen of all is the first wife, Mary
Ann Angell, an aged lady, whose five children
three sons, two daughters are now grown up.
She lives in the White Cottage, the first house ever
built in Salt Lake Valley. Joseph and Brigham,
her eldest sons, chiefs of their race, are already



294 NEW AMERICA.

renowned in missionary labours. Sister Alice, her
eldest daughter, is my friend on the stage. The
most famous, perhaps, of these ladies is Eliza Snow,
the poetess, a lady universally respected for her
fine character, universally applauded for her fine
talents. About fifty years old, with silver hair,
dark eyes, and noble aspect simple in attire,
calm, lady-like, rather cold Eliza is the exact re
verse to any imaginary light of the harem. I am
led to believe that she is not a wife to Young
in the sense of our canon ; she is always called
Miss Eliza ; in fact, the Mormon rite of sealing a
woman to a man implies other relations than our
Gentile rite of marriage ; and it is only by a wide
perversion of terms that the female Saints who may
be sealed to a man are called his wives. Sister
Eliza lives in the Lion House, in a pretty room, on
the second floor, overlooking the Oquirrh moun
tains, the Valley, the Eiver Jordan, and the Salt
Lake ; a poet s prospect, in which form and colour,
sky and land and water, melt and fuse into a glory
without end. Young s less distinguished partners
are : Sister Lucy, by whom he has eight children ;
Sister Clara, by whom he has three children ; Sister
Zina, a poetess and teacher (formerly the wife of
Dr. Jacobs), by whom he has three children ; Sister




ELIZA SNOW, POETESS.



MARRIAGE IN UTAH. 295

Amelia, an old servant of Joseph, by whom he has
four children ; Sister Eliza (2), an English girl (the
only Englishwoman in the Prophet s house), by
whom he is said to have four or five children ;
Sister Margaret, by whom he has three or four
children ; Sister Enieline, often called the fa
vourite, by whom he has eight children. Young
himself tells me, that he has never had, and never
will have, a favourite in his house ; since desires
and preferences of the flesh have no part in the
family arrangements of the Saints.

The Apostles have fewer blessings than the
Presidents ; but the Twelve are all pluralists. The
following figures are supplied to me by George A.
Smith, cousin of the Prophet Joseph, and Historian
of the Church,

Orson Hyde, first apostle, has four wives ;

Orson Pratt, second apostle, has four wives ;

John Taylor, third apostle, has seven wives ;

Wilford Woodruff, fourth apostle, has three
wives ;

George A. Smith, fifth apostle, has five wives ;

Amasa Lyman, sixth apostle, has five wives ;

Ezra Benson, seventh apostle, has four wives ;

Charles Eich, eighth apostle, has seven wives ;

Lorenzo Snow, ninth apostle, has four wives ;



296 NEW AMERICA.

Erastus Snow, tenth apostle, has three wives ;
Franklin Eichards, eleventh apostle, has four

wives ;
George Q. Cannon, twelfth apostle, has three

wives.

With the exception of John Taylor, the apostles
are considered poor men ; and in Salt Lake it is
held dishonest for a man to take a new wife unless
he can maintain his family in comfort, as regards
lodging, food, and clothes. Some of the rich mer
chants are encouraged by Young to add wife on
wife. A bold and pushing elder said to me last
night, in answer to some banter, " I shall certainly
marry again soon ; the fact is, I mean to rise in
this church; and you have seen enough to know
that no man has a chance in our society unless
he has a big household. To have any weight
here, you must be known as the husband of three
women."



207



CHAPTEE XXVIII.

POLYGAMOUS SOCIETY.

Ox the political strength which this fashion of
plurality lends to the Saints of Salt Lake City, a
few words may be said. Two questions present
themselves, In the first place, has the promise of
a plurality of wives proved to be a good bribe,
inducing men of a certain class to join the Mormon
Church ? And, in the second place, has the practice
of plurality shown itself to be a means by which,
when converts have been won, they can be made to
multiply in numbers far beyond the ordinary
rate?

To the first query, only one answer can be
truly given. Name the motive as you please ; call
it, with the Saints, desire of the spirit ; call it,
with the Gentiles, desire of the flesh ; the fact will
remain, that a license for making love to many
women, for sealing them as wives, for gathering



298 NEW AMERICA.

them into secluded harems, has acted in the past,
and is acting in the present, as a powerful and
seductive bribe.

Young and Pratt declare that the carnal
appetites have no immediate share in their own
selection of brides ; that this business of selection
is the work of Heaven ; that the act of sealing
is a religious rite ; and that a wife for eternity,
the queen and partner of a celestial throne,
can be given to a man by none but God. Young
told me, with a laughing eye, that they would
put their wives in evidence of what they say ;
many of these ladies being old, plain, unedu
cated, ill-mannered ; though others, as my eyes
inform me, are young, fresh, delicate, and charming.
But, who can doubt that Young, with his keen
sense of power, and his mastery of all the springs
of action, is well aware of the political uses
to be made of this great appeal of beauty to
the carnal man ? If taking a fresh wife once
a-year be an act of obedience, it serves the Saints
very much like a call of pleasure. Yet, w T ho shall
say they are insincere ? Young told me that in
the early days of their strange institution, he was
much opposed to plural households, and I am
confident that he speaks the truth. Among the



POLYGAMOUS SOCIETY. 299

Mormon presidents and apostles, we have not
seen one face on which liar and hypocrite were
written. Though we daily meet with fanatics,
we have not seen a single man whom we can call
a rogue. Their faith is not our faith, their prac
tice is not our practice. What then? Among
the Hindoos, many sects indulge in rites which
English people call licentious ; some, indeed, being
so abominable, that a man who sees them for the
first time is apt to call for the police. Could the
Eas Mandala be performed in London? Would
the Kanchulayas be allowed to celebrate their
worship in New York? Yet there are men and
women, living under the sceptre of Victoria, who
in perfect faith, if not in perfect innocency, imi
tate the amorous sports of Krishna, choosing the
partners of their delirious worship by the lottery
of the vest.

Young may believe in what he says, and in
what he does (for I think him, in the sphere of
his knowledge, and his customs, an honest man) ;
but some of his followers are accused of taking
pains to preach a plurality of wives, as one of the
rewards of conversion to his church ; and I know
that they are fond of quoting the promise made
by Nathan to David, that he should wed and



300 NEW AMERICA.

enjoy the wives of his enemy Saul. That this gos
pel of indulgence is found by the Saints to be most
alluring in Gentile lands, their missionaries would
certainly not deny. It may be that either the
flesh is weak or the spirit strong ; but the Welsh
peasant, the London tailor, the Lancashire weaver,
is found to pore with a rapt eye and a burning
pulse over the pictures painted by missionaries of
that Paradise near Salt Lake, in which a man is
free to do all things that his arm can compass, to
have as many houses as he can build, as many
wives as he can feed and govern. An unregenerate
man is told that a harem may be not only law
fully kept, but easily gained the female heart
being opened by a special providence to the truth
as it lies in Young that there are plenty of beau
tiful girls at Salt Lake ; and that a Saint is invited
and enjoined to live up to the perfect law. Few
elders, it is said, come back to Utah from a
journey without bringing a new favourite, won
from among the Gentiles to his fold. One of
Young s wives was a married lady in New York,
who fell in love with the Prophet and fled with
him from her husband s house. It is one of the
pleasantries of Utah, that Kimball never lets a
missionary go forth on a journey without giving



POLYGAMOUS SOCIETY. 301

him injunctions to bring back young lambs. It is
noted, as a rule, that the high dignitaries of the
church have been blest by heaven with the
prettiest women ; one of those recompenses of a
virtuous life which Helvetius conceived as desirable,
but which no society has ever yet had the wit and
daring to adopt.

To the second query two answers may be re
turned. In a fixed society, like that of Turkey, of
Syria, of Egypt, the existence of polygamy would
have no great influence on the powers of increase.
Once, indeed, men thought otherwise. Writers,
like Montesquieu, seeing that polygamy prevailed
in many parts of the East, imagined that in these
regions the females must be far in excess of the
males, and that the appropriation of several wo
men to one man was a rule of nature, made from
the earliest times, by way of correcting a freak of
birth. Travellers, like Niebuhr, finding his Arab
sheikhs with harems, hinted that polygamy arose
from the circumstance that Arab women grow old
and barren while their husbands are still young and
hale. These delusions have long since gone the way
of all error.

Now, we can happily say, in the light of science,
that even in Egypt and Arabia the males and



302 NEW AMERICA.

females are born in about equal numbers ; the
males being a little in excess of the females. We
see, then, that Nature has put the human family
on the earth in pairs ; rejecting by her own
large mandate all those monstrous and irregular
growths apart from the conjugal relations . estab
lished by herself between male and female ; whether
those growths have taken the shape either of
polygamy or of polyandry, either many wives
to one husband, or many husbands to one wife.
The true law of nature, therefore, is, that one
male and one female shall make their home
together; and in an old country, where the sexes
are equal, where the manners are uniform, and
where the religion is common, any departure from
this true law will rather weaken than increase the
multiplying power of the country as a whole. So
far the answer seems to go one way. The
question, however, is, not as to the growth of
a whole nation : but as to that of a particular
family, of a particular community, of a mere sect
within the boundaries of that nation. Even in
Arabia, it is clear that if a particular sheikh
could invent some means of getting from other
tribes a great many of their women, until he
had enough females in his power to give three



POLYGAMOUS SOCIETY. 303

wives to every male adult in his camp, the
tribe of that sheikh would increase in numbers
faster than their neighbours who had only one
wife apiece. This is something like the case
in America with the Saints. Their own society
could not give them the plurality of wives which
they announce as the social law of all coming
time. But granted that, by either good or evil
means, they could get the women into their
church, it is idle to deny that the possession of
such a treasure gives them enormous powers of
increase. One man may be the father of a hundred
children ; one woman can hardly be the mother
of a score. We know that Jair and Hillel must
have been polygamists, the moment we hear that
the first had thirty sons and the second had forty
sons.

It is not an easy thing to count the number of
children in the different households at Salt Lake.
The census papers cannot be quoted, since they
were made up, the Apostle Taylor tells me, mainly
by guessing on the part of a Gentile officer, who
would not go about and count. In this city, a
Moslem jealousy appears to guard such facts as
would be public property in London and New
York. Young tells us he has forty-eight children



304 NEW AMERICA.

now alive. Kimball has, perhaps, an equal number.
Every house seems full ; wherever we see a woman,
she is nursing ; and in every house we enter two or
three infants in arms are shown to us. This valley
is, indeed, the true baby land. For a man to have
twenty boys and girls in his house is a common fact.
A merchant, with whom we were dining yesterday,
could not tell us the number of his children until
he had consulted a book then lying on his desk.
One of his wives, a nice English lady, with the usual
baby at her breast, smiled sweet reproof on his
ignorance ; but the fact was so ; and it was only
after counting and consulting that he could give us
the exact return of his descendants. This patriarch
is thirty- three years old.

It was by means of polygamy that Israel in
creased in a few generations so as to confound all
sense of numbers ; and no one can mistake the
tendency among these American Saints. Young
has more children than Jair ; Pratt than Hillel ;
Kimball than Ibzan. This rate of growth may
not be kept up for a hundred years ; in time it
must slacken of itself for want of supplies ; but
for the present moment it exists : not the least
ominous of those facts which a statesman of the
New America has to face.



305



CHAPTEE XXIX.

THE DOCTRINE OF PLURALITIES.

WHEN the Saints were engaged in seizing, as they
say, for their own use, all that was found to be fair
and fruitful in other creeds, they would appear to
have added to the relations of husband and wife,
as these have been fixed by the codes of all civi
lised states, whether Christian, Moslem, Jewish, or
Hindoo, some highly dramatic details. Not only
have the Saints adopted polygamy into their church,
but they have borrowed it under its oldest and most
savage form.

Taken by itself, apart from surrounding schools
of thought, the mere fact of a new church having
brought itself to allow plurality of wives among its
members, would not need to startle us very much,
since many of us are familiar with such a system
in legend and in history, even though we may
be strangers to it by actual sight and sound.
VOL. i. x



306 NEW AMEKICA.

Abraham and David practised it. Neither Moses
nor Paul forbade it ; and Mohammed, while purify
ing it of the grosser Oriental features, sanctioned
it by his words and sanctified it by his deeds.
Polygamy enters into the poetry of Cordova, the
romance of Bagdad. The enterprising Parsee, the
learned Brahman, the fiery Eajpoot, all embrace it.
Even in the Christian Church, opinions are divided
as to whether it is wrong in itself, or only a trouble
in the social body. Many of the early converts, both
in Syria and in Egypt, were polygamists ; and the
questions which have recently disturbed Colenso
and the Kaffir chief had arisen in primitive times,
when the policy of admitting men having several
wives into fellowship was affirmed by fathers of
the church. Nor would the appearance of polygamy
in these plains of Salt Lake be a novel and surpris
ing fact, since everything that we know of Ute
and Shoshone compels us to believe that plurality
has always been the domestic law of these valleys.
The sides of these sierras are wild and bare ; a
poor country and a hard life induce polygamy ; and
all the tribes of red men which seek a scanty
subsistence in these glens and plains practise the
nomadic custom of stealing and selling squaws.
A big chief prides himself on having plenty of



THE DOCTRINE OF PLURALITIES. 307

wives ; and the white men, who have come to live
among these Utes, Cheyennes, Arappahoes, and
Kiowas, whether they began as trappers, guides,
interpreters, or hunters, have almost always fallen
into the Indian way of living. The dozen pale
faces, known to be dwelling with Indian tribes
at this moment hunting buffalo, cutting scalps
are all polygamists ; often with larger harems than
the biggest native chiefs.

But, the Saints have not simply revived poly
gamy in Utah ; they have returned to that form
of domestic life in both its unlimited and its
incestuous forms. In their search for the founda
tions of a new society, they have gone back to the