AT MONROE.

"Schooling" in the Mormon districts—Innocence as to whisky, but connoisseurs in water—"What do you think of that water, sir?"—Gentile dependents on Mormon charity—The one-eyed rooster—Notice to All!

SITTING at the door next morning, I saw a very trimly-dressed damsel of twenty or thereabouts, coming briskly along under the trees, which there, as in every other Mormon settlement, shade the side-walk. She was the schoolmistress, I learned, and very soon her scholars began to pass along. I had thus an opportunity of observing the curious, happy-go-lucky style in which "schooling" is carried on, and I was sorry to see it, for Mormonism stands urgently in need of more education, and it is pure folly to spend half the revenue of the Territory annually in a school establishment, if the children and their parents are permitted to suppose that education is voluntary and a matter of individual whim. Some of the leading members of the Church are conspicuous defaulters in this matter, and do their families a gross wrong by setting "the chores" and education before them as being of equal importance. Even in the highest class of the community children go to school or stay away almost as they like, and provided a little boy or girl has the shrewdness to see that he or she can relieve the father or mother from trouble by being at home to run errands and do little jobs about the house, they can, I regret to think, regulate the amount of their own schooling as they please. I know very well that Utah compares very favourably, on paper, with the greater part of America, but I have compiled and examined too many educational statistics in my time to have any faith in them.

But in the matter of abstinence from strong drink and stimulants, the leaders of the Church set an admirable example, and I found it very difficult most of the time, and quite impossible part of it, to keep my whisky flask replenished.

My system of arriving at the truth as to the existence of spirit stores in any particular settlement, was to grumble and complain at having no whisky, and to exaggerate my regrets at the absence of beer. The courtesy of my hosts was thus challenged, and of the sincerity of the efforts made to gratify my barbaric tastes, I could have no doubt whatever. In most cases they were quite ignorant of even the cost of liquor, and on one occasion a man started off with a five-dollar piece I had given him to get me "five dollars' worth of whisky in this bottle," pointing to my flask. I explained to him that I only wanted the flask replenished, and that there would be change to bring back. He did not get any at all, however.

On one occasion the Bishop brought in, in evident triumph, two bottles of beer. On another I went clandestinely with a Mormon, after dark, and drank some whisky "as a friend," and not as a customer, with another Mormon, who "generally kept a bottle on hand" for secret consumption. That they would both have been ashamed for their neighbours to know what they were about, I am perfectly convinced. On a third occasion an official brought me half a pint of whisky, and the price was a dollar.

Now it is quite impossible for me, who have thus made personal experiment, to have any doubt as to the prevailing sobriety of these people. I put them repeatedly to the severest test that you can apply to a hospitable man, by asking point-blank for ardent spirits. Sometimes, in an off-hand way, I would give money and the flask to a lad, and ask him to "run across to the store and get me a little whisky or brandy." He would take both and meander round in an aimless sort of way. But I might almost as well have asked him to go and buy me a few birds-of-paradise or advance sheets of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." The father or a neighbour might perhaps suggest a "likely" place to get some stimulant, but, as a rule, the quest was unconditionally abandoned as hopeless.

The Elders of the Church set a strict example themselves, discouraging, by their own abstinence, indulgence even in tea and coffee. You are asked in a settlement whether you will have tea or coffee, just as in England you would be asked whether you would drink ale or claret. A strong man takes a cup of tea as a lady in Europe might take a glass of sherry, as justified by unusual exercise and fatigue. Being a Londoner, I entertain a most wholesome suspicion of water as a drink, and I reverence fresh milk. In rural Utah, milk being so abundant, the people think little of it, but they pride themselves on their water.

"What do you think of that water, sir?" was a question that puzzled me to answer at first, for I am not a connoisseur in drinking-water. If it had been a claret, I might have made a pretence of criticism. But water! Or if they had let me wash in it, I would have told them whether I thought it "hard" or "soft." But to pass an opinion on a particular tumbler of water, as if it were a special brand laid down by my host for his own drinking, completely puzzled me. I can no more tell waters apart than I can tell Chinamen. Of course I can discriminate between the outcome of the sea and of sulphur springs. But for the rest, it seems to me that they only differ in their degrees of cleanliness, or, as scientific men say, to "the properties which they hold in solution," that is mud. And mud, I take it, is always pretty much the same.

So at first when my host would suddenly turn to me with, "What do you think of that water, sir?" I made the mistake of supposing it might be one of the extraordinary aqueous novelties for which this territory is so remarkable—hot-geyser water or petrifying water, or something else of the kind—and would smack my lips critically and venture on a suggestion of "lime," or "soda," or "alkali." But my host was always certain to be down with, "Oh, no; I assure you. That is reckoned the best water in the county!"

I soon discovered, however, that the right thing to say was that I preferred it, "on the whole," to the water at the last place. This was invariably satisfactory—unless, of course, there was a resident of "the last place" present, when an argument would ensue. These people, in fact, look upon their drinking-water just as on the continent they look upon their vins ordinaires, or in England upon their local brews, and to the last I could not help being delighted at the manner in which a jug of water and tumblers were handed about among a party of fatigued and thirsty travellers. I always took my share becomingly, but sometimes, I must confess, with silent forebodings.

For in some places there are springs which petrify, by coating with lime, any substance they flow over, and I did not anticipate with any gratification having my throat lined with cement, or my stomach faced with building-stone.

"Who are those children?" said I to my host at Munroe, pointing to two ragged little shoeless waifs that were standing in his yard and evidently waiting to be taken notice of. Instead of replying, my host turned towards them.

"Well, Jimmy," said he, "what is it to-day?"

The wistful eyes looking out from under the tattered, broad-brimmed hats, brightened into intelligence.

"Another chicken for mother," said both together, promptly; and then, as if suddenly overtaken by a sense of their audacity, the forlorn little lads dropped their eyes and stood there, holding each other's hands, as picturesque and pathetic a pair as any beggar children in Italy. In the full sunlight, but half shaded by the immense brims of those wonderfully ancient hats, the urchins were irresistibly artistic, and if met with anywhere in the Riviera, would have been sure of that small-change tribute which the romantic tourist pays with such pleasant punctuality to the picturesque poverty of Southern childhood. But this was in Utah.

And my host looked at them from under his tilted straw hat. They stood in front of him as still as sculptors' models, but fingers and toes kept exchanging little signals of nervous distress.

"All right. Go and get one," said my host suddenly. "Take the young rooster that's blind of one eye."

He had to shout the last instructions in a rapid crescendo as the youngsters had sprung off together at the word "go," like twin shafts from those double-arrowed bows of the old Manchurian archers. Three minutes later and a most woful scrawking heralded the approach of the captors and the captive. The young rooster, though blind of one eye, saw quite enough of the situation to make him apprehensive, but the younger urchin had him tight under his arm, and, still under the exciting influences of the chase and capture, the boys stood once more before my host, with panting bodies, flushed cheeks, and tufts of yellow hair sprouting out through crevices of those wondrous old hats, which had evidently just seen service in the capture. And the rooster, feeling, perhaps, that he was now before the final court of appeal, scrawked as if machinery had got loose inside him and he couldn't stop it.

"How's your (scraw-w-w-k) mother?"

She's (scraw-w-w-k)—and she's (scraw-w-w-k) nothing to eat all yesterday." (Scraw-w-k.)

"Go on home, then."

And away down the middle of the road scudded the little fellows in a confusion of dust and scrawk.

"Who are those children?" I asked again, thinking I had chanced on that unknown thing, a pauper Mormon.

"Oh," said my host, "he's a bad lot—an outsider—who came in here as a loafer, and deserted his wife. She's very ill and pretty nigh starving. Ay, she would starve, too, if her boys there didn't come round regular, begging of us. But loafers know very well that 'those——Mormons' won't let anybody go hungry. Ay, and they act as if they knew it, too."

In other settlements there are exactly such similar cases, but I would draw the attention of my readers—I wish I could draw the attention of the whole nation to it—to the following notice which stands to this day with all the force of a regular by-law in these Mormon settlements:—

"NOTICE TO ALL.

"If there are any persons in this city who are destitute of food, let them be who they may, if they will let their wants be known to me, privately or otherwise, I will see that they are furnished with food and lodging until they can provide for themselves. The bishops of every ward are to see that there are no persons going hungry.

"(Signed by the Presiding Bishop.)"

Now it may be mere "sentiment" on my part, but I confess that this "Notice to All," in the simplicity of its wording, in the nobility of its spirit, reads to me very beautifully. And what a contrast to turn from this text of a universal charity, that is no respecter of persons, to the infinite meanness of those who can write, as in the Salt Lake Tribune, of the whole community of Mormons as the villainous spawn of polygamy!"

It is a recognized law among the Mormons that no tramp shall pass by one of their settlements hungry; if it is at nightfall, he is to be housed. Towards the Indians their policy is one of enlightened and Christian humanity. For their own people their charity commences from the first. Emigrated to this country by the voluntary donations which maintain the "Perpetual Emigration Fund," each new arrival is met with immediate care, and being passed on to his location, finds (as I have described in another chapter) a system of mutual kindliness prevailing which starts him in life. If sick, he is cared for. If he dies, his family is provided for. All this is fact. I have read it in no books, heard it from no hoodwinking elders. My informants are lads just arrived in Salt Lake City—within an hour or two of their arrival, in fact; young men just settling down in their first log hut in rural settlements: grown men now themselves engaged in the neighbourly duty of assisting new-comers.

I have met and talked to those men—Germans, Scandinavians, Britishers—in their own homes here in Utah, and have positively assured myself of the fact I state, that charity, unquestioning, simple-hearted charity, is one of the secrets of the strength of this wonderful fabric of Mormonism. The Mormons are, more nearly than any other community in the world on such a scale, one family. Every man knows all the rest of his neighbours with an intimacy and a neighbourly interest that is the result of reciprocal good services in the past. This is their bond of union. In India there is "the village community" which moves, though in another arc, on the same plane as the Mormon settlement system. There, to touch one man's crop is to inflame the whole clan with the sense of a common injury. Here it is much the same. And as it is between the different individuals in a settlement, so it is between the different settlements in the territory. A brutal act, like that eviction of the Mormon postmaster at Park City the other day, disturbs the whole of Mormonism with apprehensions of impending violence. A libel directed at a man or woman in Salt Lake City makes a hundred thousand personal enemies in Utah. Now, with what petard will you hoist such a rock?

Induce these Mormons to hate one another "for all the world like Christians," as George Eliot said, and they can be snapped as easily as the philosopher's faggots when once they were unbundled. But in the meantime abuse of individuals or "persecution" of a class simply cements the whole body together more firmly than ever. Mutual charity is one of the bonds of Mormon union. It is the secret of this "oneness" which makes the Salt Lake Tribune yelp so.