CHAPTER XLIV.
The Mormon newspapers very properly declaim against "the people" of Utah being branded as murderers, because murders have been committed within their Territory, and, further, they protest against the great "crimes being charged to Brigham Young. Unfortunately for these defenders, no sane person, in or out of the Territory of Utah, ever did hold "the people" responsible for the black deeds of their history, and if the Prophet is selected by the universal judgment of mankind to bear the charge of crimes, his own teachings may have had something to do with inducing that conclusion.
When a public teacher utters a thousand times the statement that it is his right to dictate, direct, and control the affairs of a whole people, from the building of a temple down "to the ribbons that a woman should wear," or to "the setting-up of a stocking," and that his influence over the passions of men and women in a religious assembly was so potential that, if he "had but crooked his little finger" they would have torn a United States judge to pieces, neither he nor his friends can righteously complain when violence is done among such a people, without personal cause being visible, that a suspicion should follow that "the ruling priesthood" may have been the cause.
That the citizens of Cedar, Parowan, Pinto, Harmony, and Washington settlements, south of Fillmore, were any more
