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Show POL YQAM1A. 95 mimic, and we have the secret of Brigham's strength as an orator. Of eloquence he has none whatever; before a cultured or critical audience he would be a hopeless failure. Whatever greatness he has, finds its source in his splendid physical organization. Thence is his energy, his invincible will, his iron disregard of the sufferings of others the qualities that have made him. His was also the rare good fortune to fall just at the right time into just the right place for his peculiar talents; for it is scarcely possible that in the ordinary pursuits of life he would have made more than ordinary success. The accident of one man's death and the apostasy of two others, made him President of the Twelve Apostles just before Joe Smith's death; after that event, there was none to oppose him save the flighty and un-reliable Sidney Rigdon, whom the Mormons had never trusted, and so Brigham necessarily became head of the Church. BRIGHAM'S RESIDENCES. It is a noteworthy fact that in almost every scheme Brigham has undertaken, except managing the Mormons, he has completely failed. His Colorado warehouses, beet- sugar factories, Cottonwood Canal, B. Y. Express, and hand- cart emigration scheme, one and all, proved dis-astrous failures, the last resulting in three hundred deaths, and the most frightful suffering. Similarly every colony Brigham has sent to the surrounding territories has finally been abandoned as a failure, from Lemhi, on the north, to San Bernardino, on the south. Not a few look forward to his death as a great aid to the disintegration of Mormondom; his continued life will do far more in that direction. " When he took command of the Mormons they had, according to their own accounts, over 200,000 members in all the world; now they num- |
