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424
THE CITY OF THE SAINTS.
Chap. X.

tween learning and ignorance" which distinguished the grammar-schools of the Western Islands in the days of Samuel Johnson. Amid such a concourse of European converts, any language, from Hebrew to Portuguese, can be learned. Mathematics and the exact sciences have their votaries. There are graduates of Harvard, Dartmouth, and other colleges. I saw one gentleman who had kept a school in Portsmouth, and another, who had had a large academy in Shropshire, taught in the school of the 14th ward. Music, dancing, drawing, and other artlets, which go by the name of accomplishments, have many votaries. Indefatigable travelers there are in abundance. Almost every Mormon is a missionary, and every missionary is a voyager. Captain Gibson, a well-known name for "personal initiative" in the Eastern Main, where he was seized by the Dutch of Java, lately became a convert to Mormonism, married his daughter to Mr. Brigham Young, and in sundry lectures delivered in the Tabernacle, advised the establishment of a stake of Zion in the "Islands of the Seas," which signified, I suppose, his intention that the Netherlands should "smell H—ll." Law is commonly studied, and the practice, as I have shown, is much simplified by the absence of justice. A solicitor from London is also established here. Theology is the growth of the soil. Medicine is represented by two graduates—one of Maryland; the other, who prefers politics to practice, of New York. I am at pains to discover what gave rise to the Gentile reports that the Mormons, having a veritable horror of medicine, leave curing to the priests, and dare not arrogate the art of healing. Masterships and apprenticeships are carefully regulated by Territorial law. Every one learns to read and write; probably the only destitutes are the old European pariahs, and the gleanings from the five or six millions of English illiterati. The Mormons have discovered, or, rather, have been taught, by their necessities as a working population in a state barely twelve years old, that the time of school drudgery may profitably be abridged. A boy, they say, will learn all that his memory can carry during three hours of book-work, and the rest had far better be spent in air, exercise, and handicraft. To their eminently practical views I would offer one suggestion, the advisability of making military drill and extension movements, with and without weapons, a part of scholarhood. For "setting up" the figure, forming the gait, and exercising the muscles, it is the best of gymnastic systems, and the early habit of acting in concert with others is a long stride in the path of soldiership.

While it is the fashion with some to deride the attempts of this painstaking and industrious community of hard-handed men to improve their minds, other anti-Mormons have taken the popular ground of representing the Saints as averse to intellectual activity, despisers of science, respecters only of manual labor, and "singulièrement épris de la force brutale." It is as ungenerous as to rid-