- POETRY... -Reflections in the graveyard and on the 710 579 March of Reason 797 Polish Customs McKean and the Voorhees Bill 299 Political Corruption 757 McKean and Baskin once more 412 Polygamous Marriages in Utah, 257, 268 Meetings at Logan 594 Power of Congress over the Territories, 753, Methodists on the War Path, The 769, 785. Mighty Railway Project, A 812 Preachers' Diet 645 Minutes of a Surprise Meeting.. 157 Preparing for War 583 Minutes of a Meeting at Ogden 417 President Young again in Court 70 Minutes of a Two Days' Meeting at President Smith in the Eastern States 483 Brigham City 443 Prevalence of Crime 468 Missionary Jottings. 629 Progress West of the Mississippi 429 Mistaken Idea, A.... 39 Progress of the Work on the Islands of Modern Crime of Large Families, The 581 the Sea 826 Mormonism, Mr. Fitch on.. Mormon Railroad Enterprise Mormons, The 2 Proposed Triumvirate Rule, The 332 65 Prospects for Utah 35 ... 86 Providential Escape, A 183 139 Punishment for Adultery in Turkey 484 ........... ..141, 516, 772 Q Mormon Problem, The Mormon Question, The 150 Question of Bail, The 423 R New Theory, A Notes of Utah Old Bachelors Persecution Mosaic History Confirmed....... Ninth Commandment, The Not for Us....................................... 157 Observe the Sabbath Day...... Oppressed Women of Utah, The......... 764 Our Return to Barbarism P Parting of the Ways, The....... Plain Talk to the Girls 140 N 62 Re-discovery of the Open Polar Sea 812 450. 646. 660 833 539 Retrospection 743 580 497 Return to First Principles, A Rich Family Gathering, The 513 Rush Through Life, The... 727 465 740 Russian Notions of Priesthood and ... S CHILDREN are a continuation of the great life stream of eternity, ever flowing and increasing in volume to occupy immensity. They come to us pure from the presence of the Father, to receive their portion of mortality, in giving which we but pay the debt incurred to the Giver of life for our own existence. We only initiate them as others have us, into the shadowy regions of death, that they may have the privilege of passing through its portals to a more perfect life beyond. As parents, we are too apt to throw ourselves upon our dignity, to consider our children too far beneath us, to look upon them as mere novices in the experiences of existence. If the former spiritual life helps to mould and develop the present, may not the egotism of adult age often assume more than the circumstances really warrant? What is the great difference between the little daughter who smoothes the ruffles of her new apron with complacent pride, and the mother matron who goes into ecstacies over a new dress, or "a love of a bonnet," or between the little son who delights in his rocking horse, and the father who glories in the fast trotter, with which he can distance his neighbors? only that the older has tired of the toys which please the younger. If, as spiritual existences, we were present when the foundations of the earth were laid, the few years we may have passed here more than our children are but a small item in the sum total of our existence, and it ill becomes us to pride ourselves, overmuch, on the great wisdom we may have acquired in so short a time. There is no part of human existence which appears so full of pleasure as healthy childhood, when love shields and protects. Such a childhood is ever a bright spot in the memory-an oasis in the desert of life, which helps to keep the affections alive while in contact with chilling realities. Hard is the fate of children whose expanding natures reach out for affection and sympathy to only meet with a cold repulse. Only an honest heart and a kind providence will keep such from vicious ways, for uncultivated affections leave a void for vice to creep in. The child, whose days are passed with the mere privilege of living, who if fed and clothed, because some one conceives it to be a duty to keep it from starvation and nakedness, because it is a human being, whose little hands are forced to early toil, that it may earn the pittance which charity doles out to it; who retires to rest weary and lonely, with no mother's kiss or kind father's good. night, to quicken the impulses of love and peace in its bosom, can never entirely recover from the evil effects of the chills which withered the flowers of affection in the bud, to leave a desolate spot in the heart in after life. The compulsory smothering of the affections in childhood and youth, often creates a confirmed habit in after life, and throws around us the icy coldness of reserve. This begets reserve in those who would sweeten our existence with the sympathies of real friendship, and shuts out the sunshine, that would otherwise cheer our journey through life. Akin in misfortune to the real orphan, are those children who see in their father only the dignified guardian, watching for faults, to chastise with the greatest severity. Children, in order to thrive well, need to skip and play, as well, as the lambs in the meadow. They need the invigorating influence of love, as well as the light and warmth of the luminary of day. They should be treated with more kindness than severity, with more patience than chastisement. It speaks ill for the wisdom of a father, and the happiness of a home, when his presence checks hilarity and cheerfulness, and causes his little ones to slip away into the nooks and corners, to watch, like mice a cat, for him to disappear before coming out. Such a reigning spirit in a household is certaintly the antipodes of that manifested by our Saviour, when he took little children in his arms and blessed them. Children generally remain in such a home but a short time after they are able to leave it, and the parents reap the natural results of their unwise course in occupying their firesides alone in their old age.-Deseret News. The operations of the financial system defy precedent, and offer the most successful example on record of cooperation. Ordinarily capital induces labor, and labor in turn invites capital, but in Utah may be witnessed the phenomenon of wealth accumulated independent either of imported nucleus, commercial advantage or natural resources, for it will be remembered that Utah had achieved nearly her present industrial status before a pound of bullion had been taken from her mines. From a people poverty-ridden, sterile of resort, strangers to invention, untutored in art, without navigable waters uniting their prairies with the sea, devoid of railroads or other means of connection with commercial or manufacturing centres, destitute of everything except industry, there has been built up a structure of wealth and credit which to-day forces San Francisco and Chicago into eager strife for entrance to its portals and casts the reflex of its "MORMONISM." I glittering walls into the fogs of London. I am not here to apologize for the Mormons, but I offer it as my candid opinion that the motives of those who engrafted polygamy upon a faith not otherwise especially obnoxious were sincere and conscientious. That they are struggling with an error of which they must unburden themselves we can but know. That they are honest in their error I cannot for a moment doubt. I believe that the great majority of the men and women who practise and uphold polygamy in Utah do so as a matter of religious conviction. believe that in many cases the taking of a second wife is to the husband a painful religious duty religiously performed. I find in their condition in this respect something to excite my curiosity, little to move my hatred and much to elicit my compassion. Men and woman seem to me alike only the self-immolated victims of a cruel and uncompensating system of barbarism. There is missionary work to be done in Utah surely, but bungling politicians and careless adventurers are not the best husbandmen of the seed of reform. Thus far the Gentile emi grants have not largely increased the stock of available piety, nor been evangelists of unalloyed blessing. The mistake the Mormons have made is in being white and industrious. If they were only polygamous savages in place of polygamous Christians; if they could stain their cuticles a dusky red, call their bishops chiefs, their wives squaws, and their children papooses; if they would steal their horses instead of buy ing them, beg their blankets instead of weaving them, scalp emigrants rather than feed them, refrain from all honest labor and live as a tribe of noble mendicants upon the bounty of the United States government, they might become the darlings instead of the outcasts of eastern sentimentalists. (Applause.) The destinies of Utah have thus far been shaped by a person whose mo tives may have been misapprehended, but whose ability has scarcely been overrated, for Brigham Young is unquestionably one of the boldest, most sagacious and capable of living men. He is an organizer, a harmonizer, a magnetizer. His power, self-instituted and self-poised as it is, is almost supreme with his followers. A hundred and fifty thousand people are busy to-day realizing his idealizations, articulating his plans, and giving earnest response to the spirit of his projects and purposes. To suppose him an imposter, a trickster, a veiled fiend of Khorassan, practising his juggler's arts before the walls of heaven and laughing at the delusion of his victims, is the greatest of misjudgments. It is impossible, divested of prejudice, to believe that he is other than a concientious, benevolent man, who perhaps mistakes the reflections of his own observant powerful brain for revelations from on High. It may be said that he has ingrafted a feature of the effete and corrupt civilization of Asia upon a nineteenth-century community; that he has religionized sensuality and organized grossness. But with this one wrong he has linked a thousand vir tues. His people, who have grown in twenty-five years from a handful of fugitives, regard him with affection, reverence and pride, and he may almost be pardoned for mistaking his judgment for inspiration, favorable accidents for direct interpositions of Providence, for every storm that has gathered against his people has changed in its descent to a golden shower. For twenty years one-tenth of the earnings of a community now numbering 150,000 souls, and averaging from an early date in their organization more than half that number, has been poured into the treasury of a church of which Brigham Young is the spiritual president and sole temporal trustee in trust. That wealth has not been hoarded. The current report of "riches in the Bank of England" is such stuff as dreams are made of. The riches of the Mormon church will not be found in unproductive accumulations anywhere, but institutions of industry and skill, in railroads and steam wagons and telegraph lines, in woollen and cotton factories, grist, saw and paper mills, newspapers and co-operative stores.* * The Female suffrage exists in Utah, and the irrepressible woman's rights movement is virtually if not avowedly opposed to connubial felicity everywhere. This is not a marrying century. cost of maintaining a wife is greater, women are confessedly more extravagant than formerly, and the same reasons which operate elsewhere will creep into Mormon institutions. In closing his description of Mormon character and manners, Mr. Fitch proposed as the wisest way to a solution of the "problem" to leave polygamy to die, make a state of Utah, condone her past and admit her to the Union on the condition that polygamy shall not be legalized or perpetuated. He was closely listened to and frequently cheered during the evening. The lecture will be given in the city soon. The above is a very brief abridgement of one of the best lectures of the season.—Boston Paper. He who blackens others does not whiten himself. Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life. |