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for the maintenance of social order in a polygamous than in a monogamous community. Proof that such is the fact in the United States has not yet appeared. More than anything else, the Mormons of Utah have presented the similitude of a flock of sheep surrounded by a horde of wolves. Amid the anarchy, terrorism and crime that has made horrid the vast region around where they are located they have been the one orderly community. They have divided with the aborigines the office of serving as subjects of lawless depredation. An irregular warfare of the most unscrupulous character has been prosecuted against them from the beginning of their history. Ecclesiastical bigotry has laid down the rule which unlicensed ruffianism has carried into execution. Domineering superstition, from the pulpit, the platform and the press, sounded the notes of assault; to which outlawry, hungry for plunder and thirsty for anarchy, made haste to respond. Venal authors have been hired to invent slanders to justify the outrages that have been committed. Scores of books have been written, thousands of sermons preached, and millions of newspaper diatribes published, by persons who never saw a Mormon, to prove them the most abandoned of mankind. Tale-bearers have gone among them in search of the materials of scandal; finding of course, all they had pre-determined to discover. Under a charge of barbarism, a system of unlicensed barbarity has been prosecuted against them, disgraceful to civilization and disreputable to christianity. They have something of which to complain. They would be either more or less than human if they did not, now and then, manifest a sense of injury and a feeling of resentment. If there is anything in their conduct to merit surprise it is their forbearance. They are sincere believers in their mode of worship and plan of social and domestic order, and suffer as other believers suffer when things which they hold sacred are disparaged and profaned. Whatever abstract, opinions others may entertain of their system, it is agreeable to them. Under it, they enjoy harmony; and it might not unsuitably be asked: Has not the government of the United States enough on its hands of communities in disorder, that it needs to turn upon and inaugurate anarchy in another? Government may create a solitude and call it peace; it may institute confusion and call it order; but such counterfeit peace and order are as horrid as the genuine are excellent; and a government which unadvisedly breaks up an established social
