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culation, opens out in unwonted wealth of misinformation and verbiage. Politicians, in no long time, find that there are votes latent in the movement. Party platforms expand their liberal bosoms to receive the new doctrine. Legislators become impressed with its magnitude and find it expedient to respond to so distinct an expression of popular sentiment; and judiciaries, not to be delinquent in so noble a cause, tax their ingenuities to find law to suit the situation. Thus it is that courts are constrained to sit in judgment upon sentimentalisms.
Nevertheless, states of society are not to be judged by their own sentimental law, which is always in their favor; nor that of others, which is uniformly against them. They are to be judged by the actual of their phenomena. They are not to be appraised by what Mr. Francis Lieber or any other abstractionist imagines to be their tendencies; but by their present facts through which their tendencies are visibly and authentically expressed. There is no difficulty in ascertaining what is the rule of judgment, for it is self-evident. It has been many times laid down, by writers upon social science, from the time of Grotius and Adam Smith to that of Herbert Spencer. That state of society is right in which the social particles are in harmony. The fact of concordant existence is proof absolute of the right to exist. It is evidence that the condition is the expression of the character of the factors; and neither legislature nor judiciary is authorized to infer—what none can safely predict—that the factors would be better disposed if the condition were reconstructed.
If the patriarchs of the Mormon community had set them selves deliberately to plan and construct a scheme of social and domestic order, wherein the most flagrant and harmful of the evils and plagues which infest society elsewhere should fail to obtain an entrance, they could not have acted with more wisdom than that by which their work was characterized. Foremost among these evils and plagues are conjugal infidelity and prostitution. Both are characteristic of and inseparable from a state of society founded upon singular marriages. They have been ever present with such states of society, and, both alike, have effectually resisted every effort for their removal or mitigation. The former is the parent of innumerable crimes and perfidies, and is the occasion of more acute unhappiness and deadly enmity than all other causes combined; the latter, the scatterer of the seeds of disease, decrepitude and death; the corrupter of the blood of nations; the sapper that undermines the collective constitution:
