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Show 610 WESTERN WILDS. with scarcely a thought. It is the control the church exercises over business and government that perpetually irritates him theocracy, not polygamy, is the object of his hate. And this, too, aids in giving us the proper estimate of the inexcus-able folly of learned ministers who go to Utah to argue the question on Old Testament grounds. Just as if polygamy, slavery, incest, and ex-terminating wars were right now, because wandering patriarchs in the childhood of the world were excused in the practice of them. Even if Hebrew polygamy could be proved right, Mormon polygamy would be all the more wrong, because it permits the marriage of close blood relatives. Incest, as allowed in Utah, would be just as much under the ban of law if the Bible had never been written ; for its criminality depends not on a command, but on a law of nature, and the more civil-ized a people become the more deadly and destructive is the crime. Savages have no hereditary diseases : their mode of life kills all sickly stocks, and only the fittest survive. But in civilized life one half the families have some tendency to scrofula, insanity, or consumption. The chances are even that two cousins have inherited a common tend-ency from the common ancestor ; if they marry, that tendency is doubled or quadrupled in their offspring. If one marries an alien with a different temperament, they may justly hope to have inherited diverse tendencies which may neutralize each other and let the offspring escape both. It is the marriage of near relatives which has been the curse of Spain, and is the special curse of Utah polygamy ; if the cus-tom continues, the pure Mormon stock must die out or retrograde, in physiological self- defense, to barbarism. But my own opinion is that Mormonism is on the decline. Old Mormons die, young ones grow up infidels ; the boys take to Gentile ways, and the girls, wherever practicable, get into the Gentile towns, sometimes to' marry Gentiles, quite as often to practice polygamy without the troublesome intervention of the priest. Thus, in the future as for the past ten years, the system will slowly wear out, with some misery and much corruption. The young people will abandon the old folks' religion and have no education to take its place. The social fabric will for awhile fall ' into chaos, and Utah will pass through a season of moral storm before the better day conies. |
