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Show 96 WESTERN WILDS. ber less than half as many. They submitted all to him, and he has spent thirty years in teaching them the terrors of a religious despot-ism. Thousands have learned that it is easy to surrender rights, but hard to regain them. At first he only robbed his devotees, now he insults them. A few more years of power and he will, to quote the language of a Mormon, " hitch them up and plow the ground with them." Many intelligent men have concluded that Brigham was honest in his religious professions. I can not agree with them. I might reject all other evidence of his hypocrisy, but I can not reject his own. Again and again he lias virtually admitted that his religion was a mere convenience. To a young Mormon friend of the writer, whom he was urging to return to the fold, Brigham said: " It makes no difference whether you believe in it or not; we need you; just come along and be baptized, and pay up a little on your tithing, and it will be all right." To another he said : " It's no great concern what you believe ; I ' ve got as good a right to start a new religion as Christ or Mohammed, or any other man." And yet again, when speaking of the vote of each semi- annual conference indorsing him as a prophet, he said; " I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I have been profitable to this people." Since then the Gentiles have usually designated him " The Profit." There was a' time, I think, when he believed his religion and worked hard for it ; but as he rose in the Church he learned more, and became what he practically describes himself, a philosophic infidel. A man whose convictions depend largely on his interests, with a happy power of self- deception, a great deal of cunning, some executive ability, and behind it all an immense physical potency, with little mercy or con-science to temper it such, in brief, is Brigham Young. Late in September, I took a walk to Bear River Cafion, some eighty miles north of the city, stopping often with the rural Saints and noting their ways. This trip was through the most enlightened part of Utah, almost the only part the Eastern tourist ever sees. The villages are neat and quiet, and the little farms well watered and cultivated. But even here the great lack is apparent. The Saints have adopted the bee as their emblem, and have stopped with the blind instincts of the bee content with food and shelter, with but little regard for the higher man. Near Ogden was an old Dane, living with a mother and two daughters as wives; in Brigham City lived a bishop, married to two of his own nieces, and near Bear River was another Dane, living with three wives in a |
