Young leaves the impression that political, religious, ethical ideals in the state to-day are democratic and idealistic and essentially indistinguishable from those of any other enlightened American commonwealth. He concludes his narrative with a picture of "Utah To-day" as a highly civilized state, with a notably low percentage of crime, insanity, pauperism, and illiteracy, but with high school attendance, flourishing agriculture, manufactures and mines and lively interest in the arts and sciences.
Professor Young has liberally whitewashed the founding of Utah. But I doubt whether he has whitewashed it a whit more than the average non-Mormon historian whitewashes the foundation of Massachusetts when he prepares a book for the use of Boston schools.
Mr. Werner's book ends with the death of Brigham Young in 1877, but as he has envisaged his biographical problem, the scope of his work and its larger purpose are not very different from Professor Young's. That is to say he too is interested in the founding of Utah, and he sees the divisions of his hero's life as steps in that long epical process. Before he is done with it he makes a nationally important and most impressive figure of Brigham Young. If he came to scoff he remained to quote respectfully Seward's remark that "America had never produced a greater statesman."
Unlike the Mormon historian, however, Mr. Werner does not suppress Joseph Smith. He appears to believe that Smith was a drunkard, a profligate, and, what was worse in the circumstances, a very poor business man, even when God had carefully revealed the plans for Smith's financial campaigns and had dictated in extraordinary detail the organization of his
