Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/335

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to be confined to one woman is small business." Kimball was a sincere man; he married forty-five wives. Brigham Young and his associates believed that a man "cannot be saved without a woman at his side." Young avowed that he was a "great lover of good women." He liked them plain and honest, clean and chaste, with their hair parted in the middle and combed smoothly back from the forehead. He said, I think honestly, that there were "few men who care about the private society of women as little as I do.

Everything that he did bears that out: his marrying three or four on the same day, his assembling them in large numbers so that the intimacy of his family life was less like a solitude à deux than a church social. With much justice he contended, in that great vacant territory, that the purpose of matrimony was to replenish the earth with saints. Mr. Werner notes that in 1851 Brigham Young became a father in January, February, March and April, and in 1852 in March, April and May. He seems to have been a "natural born" father. There is something heroic in the way he faced the consequences of his beliefs. There was little romantic sentiment about him. To women who whined for love he said in effect: "What difference does it make?" If they had a child, they ought to be content, and to exclaim with joy: "Hallelujah! I am a mother—I have borne an image of God."

Brigham Young's uxoriousness can be overemphasized, his philoprogenitiveness, not. But let us pass to other matters by way of a quotation from Young's "Journal of Discourses," giving the public reflections of the Governor on Gentile curiosity relating to his domestic arrangements. I make this extended quotation to emphasize my own chief discovery about Brig-