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iron sway. His poor single vote—from which even the sting of ballot has been drawn—gratifies the dignity of the man, and satisfies him with the autocracy which directs him in the way he should go. He has thus all the harmless pleasure of voting, without the danger of injuring himself by his vote. The reverse, duly carried out, frees mankind from king and kaiser, and subjects them to snobs and mobs. Mormon society is modeled upon a civilized regiment: the Prophet is the colonel commanding, and the grades are nicely graduated down to the last neophyte or recruit. I know no form of rule superior to that of Great Salt Lake City; it might supply the author of "Happy Years at Hand" with new ideas for the "Outlines of the Coming Theocracy." It exerts its beneficial effects equally upon the turbulent and independent American; the sensible and self-sufficient Englishman; the Frenchman, ever lusting after new things; the Switzer, with his rude love of a most problematic liberty; the outwardly cold, inwardly fiery Scandinavian; the Italian, ready to bow down before any practice, with the one proviso that it must be successful; and the German, who demands to be governed by theories and Utopianisms, "worked" by professors "out of the depths of their self-consciousness."

The following description of a Conference is extracted at length from the "Daily Missouri Republican" of May 4, 1861:

 

Great Salt Lake City, April 12, 1861.

On the 6th of April, 1830, in a small room about fifteen feet square, in the town of Fayette, Seneca County, New York, a young country lad—Joseph Smith—and five other persons organized that movement now known throughout Christendom as "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints," or Mormonism. How the units have each increased to tens of thousands, and where those disciples have been found, and how they have been converted, is not the task I assign myself. I assisted, as the Frenchmen say, at the thirty-first anniversary Conference of that obscure movement, and propose to give the readers of the "Republican" its picture, and "nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice."

Twice a year the Mormons assemble in Conference, on the 6th of April and on the 6th of October, for the purpose of re-electing their presiding authorities, or making such changes among them as are deemed "wisdom" or "necessary"—the chiefs, also, making these periods seasonable for general instruction to the "body"—and in April electing and sending out missionaries to the nations of the earth, where Mormonism is flourishing, or where the New Faith has yet to be introduced.

As the settlements in the Territory are widely scattered, and communication between them rare—except where business or family purposes invite—the Conferences are looked forward to with peculiar interest by the people generally as a time of renewing acquaintance and friendship with those they have known and been associated with in the Old World. To this add the curiosity to see and hear again