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.

1. Except, of course, General Kane.