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Show 314 THE CITY OF THE SAINTS. CHAP. VI dry high-handed violations of the constitutional liberties and the dearest rights of American citizenship. For instance, the Indian war of 1852 cost them $200,000; they repeatedly memorialized Congress to defray, strictly according to precedent, these expenditures, and yet, from 1850 to 1855, they have received, in payment of expenses and treaties, grants and presents, only the sum of $95,940. Though Utah Territory has practiced far more economy than Oregon or California, the drafts forwarded by the Superintendent of Indian Affairs to the Treasury at Washington are totally neglected, or are subjected to delays and frivolous annoyances. The usual treaties with the Indians have not been held by the federal government. The Mormons' requisition for becoming a state is systematically ignored, and this ignoble minor-hood is prolonged, although they can show five head of souls for three possessed by California at the time of her admittance-another instance of a " rancorous persecuting spirit, excited by false and malicious representations." He who lifteth up an ensign on the mountains is now " about to destroy a certain nation under the name of the sour grape (Catawba?);" and the Mormons see in the present civil war at once retribution for their injuries, and the fulfillment of the denunciations of Joseph the Seer against the "Gentile land of strife and wickedness." Assuredly Fate haa played marvelously into their hands. The federal officials retort with a counter charge against the Saints of systematically obstructing the course of justice. A Mormon must be tried by his peers; however guilty, he will be surely acquitted, as a murdering fugitive slave in the North, or a thievish filibuster in the South; that it is vain to attempt jurisdiction over a people who have an ecclesiastical Star-Chamber and Vigilance Committee working out in darkness a sectarian law; that no civilized government could or would admit into a community of Christian states a power founded on prophethood and polygamy, a theodemocracy, with a Grand Lama presiding over universal suffragators; that all accusations of private immorality proceed from a systematic attack upon the federal Union through its officers; and, finally, that, so thin-skinned is Mormon sensibility, a torrent of vituperation follows the least delay made with respect to their " ridiculous pretensions." The author speaks. Of course there are faults on both sides, and each party has nothing better to do than to spy out the other's sins of omission and commission. The Americans {i. e., anti- Mormons), never very genial or unprejudiced, are not conciliatory ; they rage violently when called Gentiles, and their " respectability," a master-passion in Columbian lands, is outraged, maiden- modesty-like, by the bare mention of polygamy. On the other hand, the Latter-Day Saints, who now flourish in the Mountain Territory, and who expect eventually to flourish over the whole earth, " are naturally prepared to hate and denigrate all beyond |
