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Show Page 167 who crowded Mormon street meetings. So Orson's pen warmed to the cause. This mission was different from any other ~ he spent most of it crouched at a desk savoring his own clear, if not distinguished, phrasing of the eternal truths. Besides the pamphleteering, Orson had tremendous loads of correspondence to manage. From Orson Hyde he heard the kind of political gossip that both of them had relished and clucked over in Washington four years before. The Whigs had triumphed - Zachary Taylor was president - and in the same letter came the peculiar story of the weeks of the cricket plague and the theophanous seagulls, of the cropr.destruction - "yet...there will be 16 enough for all the population." From Wilford Woodruff came word of a new epidemic "raging to such an extent that the cholera is lost sight of... it is called the gold fever." He further learned of the Mormon soldiers who had whooped into Salt Lake with a sack of "pure virgin gold" dug from Sutter's race. And here was a letter which no doubt started Orson from his chair - regards from Oliver Cowdery, who had recently re-joined the 17 Church at the Kanesville, Iowa, encampment. The greatest news of all - the world seemed to be going up in smoke. Orson arrived in England to the echoes of street-smashing riots, part of the convulsive wave of revolution that engulfed all of Europe in 1848. The February Revolution in France had touched off insurrection almost at once everywhere else; all the German-speaking countries thrashed at peasant uprisings while Marx and Engels stirred the radical heart with their "Manifesto the battling Milanese had spread unrest all over Italy; and the conflagration had touched even the dim, smoky industrial belts of Britain. Everywhere men questioned the fabric of society and set the torch to it when they pleased, while others as passionately clung to the secure, propertied notions of 18 feudal Europe. Predictably Orson's pen advocated a clean sweep, as he |
