to the Mosaic Dispensation. Polygamy is a positive command from heaven: if the flesh is mortified by it, tant mieux—"no cross, no crown;" "blessed are they that mourn." I have heard these words from the lips of a well-educated Mormon woman, who, in the presence of a Gentile sister, urged her husband to take unto himself a second wife. The Mormon household has been described by its enemies as a hell of envy, hatred, and malice—a den of murder and suicide. The same has been said of the Moslem harem. Both, I believe, suffer from the assertions of prejudice or ignorance. The temper of the New is so far superior to that of the Old Country, that, incredible as the statement may appear, rival wives do dwell together in amity, and do quote the proverb "the more the merrier." Moreover, they look with horror at the position of the "slavey" of a pauper mechanic at being required to "nigger it" upon love and starvation, and at the necessity of a numerous family. They know that nine tenths of the miseries of the poor in large cities arise from early and imprudent marriages, and they would rather be the fiftieth "sealing" of Dives than the toilsome single wife of Lazarus. The French saying concerning motherhood—"le premier embellit, le second détruit, le troisième gâte tout," is true in the Western world. The first child is welcomed, the second is tolerated, the third is the cause of tears and reproaches, and the fourth, if not prevented by gold pills or some similar monstrosity, causes temper, spleen, and melancholy, with disgust and hatred of the cause. What the Napoleonic abolition of the law of primogeniture, combined with centralization of the peasant class in towns and cities, has effected on this side of the Channel, the terrors of maternity, aggravated by a highly nervous temperament, small cerebellum, constitutional frigidity, and extreme delicacy of fibre, have brought to pass in the older parts of the Union.
Another curious effect of fervent belief may be noticed in the married state. When a man has four or five wives, with reasonable families by each, he is fixed for life: his interests, if not his affections, bind him irrevocably to his new faith. But the bachelor, as well as the monogamic youth, is prone to backsliding. Apostasy is apparently so common that many of the new Saints form a mere floating population. He is proved by a mission before being permitted to marry, and even then women, dreading a possible renegade, with the terrible consequences of a heavenless future to themselves, are shy of saying yes. Thus it happens that male celibacy is mixed up in a curious way with polygamy, and that also in a faith whose interpreter advises youth not to remain single after sixteen, nor girls after fourteen. The celibacy also is absolute; any infraction of it would be dangerous to life. Either, then, the first propensity of the phrenologist is poorly developed in these lands—this has been positively stated of the ruder sex in California—or its action is to be regulated by habit to a greater degree than is usually believed.
