keep you from your seat in the kingdom of heaven, among the royal family of polygamists. Write often and freely.
"With sentiments of the deepest affection and kindred feeling, I remain, dear sister, your affectionate sister,CHAPTER XI.
Last Days at Great Salt Lake City.
I now terminate my observations upon the subject of Mormonism. It will be remarked that the opinions of others not my own have been recorded as carefully as my means of study have permitted, and that facts, not theories, have been the object of this dissertation.
It will, I think, be abundantly evident that Utah Territory has been successful in its colonization. Every where, indeed, in the New World, the stranger wonders that a poor man should tarry in Europe, or that a rich man should remain in America; nothing but the strongest chains of habit and vis inertiæ can reconcile both to their miserable lots. I can not help thinking that, morally and spiritually, as well as physically, the protégés of the Perpetual Emigration Fund gain by being transferred to the Far West. Mormonism is emphatically the faith of the poor, and those acquainted with the wretched condition of the English mechanic, collier, and agricultural laborer—it is calculated that a million of them exist on £25 per annum—who, after a life of ignoble drudgery, of toiling through the year from morning till night, are ever threatened with the work-house, must be of the same opinion. Physically speaking, there is no comparison between the conditions of the Saints and the class from which they are mostly taken. In point of mere morality, the Mormon community is perhaps purer than any other of equal numbers.[1] I have no wish to commend their spiritual, or, rather, their materialistic vagaries—a materialism so leveling in its unauthorized deductions that even the materialist must reject it; but with the mind as with the body, bad food is better than none. When wealth shall be less unequally distributed in England, thus doing away with the contrast of excessive splendor and utter destitution, and when Home Missions shall have done their duty in educating and evangelizing the unhappy pariahs of town and country, the sons of the land which boasts herself to be the foremost among the nations will blush no more to hear that the Mormons or Latter-Day Saints are mostly English.
About the middle of September the time of my departure drew nigh. Judge Flennikin found a change of venue to Carson Valley necessary; Thomas, his son, was to accompany him, and the
- ↑ I refer the reader to Appendix IV.
