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sending taints and rottenness down from progenitor to posterity—to reappear in scrofulous, tuberculous and cancerous complaints: in weaknesses, prematurities, effeminacies and inefficiencites, Conjugal infidelity holds society perpetually upon the verge of anarchy. Compelled to purchase order at the expense of hypocrisy, society dares not turn its reluctant senses upon the pool of corruption, only too palpable, in which it wades; and the clamors of an accusing conscience, or the protests of honest censure are met by pretenses of disgust, or promises of reform, or professions of piety, or complaints that the law does not execute its mission and restrain or punish the offenders.
In Mormondon effectual obstacles have been created to put an end to these plagues, and that by the simplest means: the providing of every marriageable woman with a husband and a home. There may be less of poetry in this arrangement, but there is more of safety; less of factitions sentiment, but more of intrinsic sincerity. In the Territory, conjugal fidelity is the rule; in the States—at least with one of the sexes—it is the exception. In the former, prostitution is not prohibited, but forestalled and prevented; in the latter, in the face of the menaces of law and the vigilance of administration, it survives undiminished; borne as a lesser evil than the disorder which, if the thing were possible, would attend upon its suppression. The majority of masculine mankind—the robust, the active and the enterprising are pluralists in fact. The difference between the men of the Territory and the men of the States, is in the hypocrisy of the latter which professes sentiments it does not feel, and pretends a continence which it neglects to practice.
Between singularism and pluralism, the question resolves itself into an inquiry: Which is the more wholesome, the legitimate and orderly or the illegitimate and disorderly? The very statute to prohibit and punish that which is dishonestly called "bigamy" in the Territories, was passed by men a majority of whom were living in concubinage, There are more practical pluralists in Washington, in proportion to the inhabitancy, than there are in Mormondom. The ratio of men in Congress who have supplementary wives in everything but name, honor and subsistence, is higher than that of the men who have such wives whom they love, honor and provide for in the tabernacle at Salt Lake City The Mormon limits his wives by his means; taking the future as well as the present into account; the statesman is subject to no
