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8
Mormonism.

ducted. Explorers bring back an account of the great Salt Lake Valley, in Utah, the locality precisely suited for the “manifest destiny” before them. Situated midway between the Mississippi and the great Pacific, they would be far enough removed from both, yet sufficiently nigh to connect their fortunes with the States that must eventually skirt either ocean. A fertile territory, capable, when artificially irrigated, and under perfect culture, of sustaining a population of four thousand to a square mile, and large enough to embrace a million of souls, invited their entrance. This valley, too, like that of the Abyssinian Prince, is insulated at every point of the compass—if not by walls of rock, at least by inhospitable, arid deserts, and untimbered slopes—which might repress the advancing tide of settlers, and leave the saints without restraint to work out their high mission. From the moment that emigration to this chosen spot was decided on, the deepest practical wisdom marks all their movements, disclosing the presiding genius of a master mind. A party of pioneers is first sent forward to occupy some portion of the waste land westward of the States, with instructions to put in a crop which might sustain the larger body soon to take up the line of march. The same wise precaution was used the following season, before arriving at their new home, when the emigrants found a harvest waiting for their sickles, the fruit of the toils of a similar advance-guard. At once,a city is symmetrically laid out, a site selected for the temple, a bowery erected for temporary worship, fields measured off, and put under cultivation, furnaces put in blast, mills built upon water courses, canals dug for the circulation of water, and the whole industry of a tried and hardy people supervised by one controlling mind. The effect of this concentrated and regulated labor is told in the stupendous results already hinted—all danger of famine is warded off, and a sufficient store provided for the saints who should obey the bugle-call of their chieftain, bidding them from afar to this land of promise. A chain of settlements is marked out, and cities founded, as stepping-stones to the Pacific coast; a Provisional government is constituted, and Utah distinctly recognised as a territory in the halls of Congress.