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Show PRACTICAL POLYGAMY. 133 polygamy, and render their lives miserable with the hope of receiving the reward promised for such sacrifices. Is it not natural and beautiful for woman to be influenced by just such motives ? The occupants of nuns' cloisters all over Chris tendom enter their seclusion for the opposite mode of life, with not dissimilar convictions of duty from those which actuate the more sincere of the Mormon women, when they become the second, third or twentieth wife. But in addi tion to the conviction of duty, and greater security which prompts the nun in her course, the Mormon woman is driven to it as the only possible way of securing the glory to which she aspires. Upon what other reasonable hypothesis can we account for their acts. Certainly the Mormon woman knows that it is foreign to her nature to be made happy in such rela tions, and all, of both sexes, who have observed the work ings of polygamy, know the tendency is to, and that it does^ degrade woman. The female Mormon is early taught that she is the inferior of man in everything, and she aspires to be his equal in nothing. She becomes a wife, knowing that she is to be made a servant, rather than a companion and helpmate, and the true relations of the connubial state are entirely perverted. At present I have no doubt wives become such of their own accord, with the influences to which I have referred operating when such are necessary ; but there is pretty strong evidence that in the earlier history of polygamy women were compelled to marry. Judge Cradlebaugh told me that when he was United States Judge in Utah, in 1858, he had the most indisputable evidence that in one of the southern settlements of that territory, on one occasion, forty young girls were confined together in. a house, and re quired to select husbands before they were released. The affidavits of some of them were parts of the evidence. Affection on the part of man is not made the foundation the first step toward even a contemplation of marriage, as it should be, but he enters into it after being somewhat attracted for mere expediency ; and not to attribute to him |