criminal category. In its worst aspect, it can only be called a vice. Drunkenness is not a crime : it is a vice. Statutory law cannot justly make criminal that which by the law of human rights is only a vice. Govern- ments may repress crime, but they never can uproot vice; and the sooner legislators realize and act upon this truth, the fewer failures they will have to record. Public sentiment and moral force are the only agen- cies which can be brought against this class of evils with any hope of success.
The right and wrong of the matter, as usually dis- cussed, are not the right and wrong of nature and common sense, but of divine and human enactment, variously interpreted and viewed from different stand- points. The bible forbids prostitution, but permits polygamy; the supporters of the bible and its civili- zation forbid polygamy, but permit prostitution.
The Mormons are held to be a most unphilosophical sect, and yet the sentiment against them is more un- philosophical than their doctrines or practices. The American congress is not a Sunday-school, neither is it within the province of government to establish and enforce a code of ethics. Congress has no more right to legislate, against their consent, for the territories than it has for the states. I do not know that all Mormons hold to this opinion, but many of them do. The idea of political nonage is only an idea; it is not a fact. Murder, theft, breach of contract, malefeasance in office, unjust monopoly, cheating, slave- holding, adulteration, bigamy, etc., are crimes to be punished by law. Drunkenness, gambling, prostitu- tion, and the like, are vices to be uprooted by precept and example. A crime is an injury to one's neighbor; a vice is an injury to one's self I have no right to in- jure my neighbor, but I have the right to do as I will with my own and myself, howsoever foolish may be the act. Congress, indeed, would have its hands full were it to undertake to pass laws to keep men from making fools of themselves. If polygamy must be
