Читать книгу Greater Britain - Charles Wentworth Dilke - Страница 18

“WHEN you are driven hence, where shall you go?”

“We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord will guide his people,” was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the Saints. “You say miracles are passed and gone,” he went on; “but if God has ever interfered to protect a church, he has interposed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside, and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted us to dictate our own terms of peace. Again, when the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, God sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord will guide his people.”

Often as I discussed the future of Utah and the church with Mormons, I could never get from them any answer but this; they would never even express a belief, as will many Western Gentiles, that no attempt will be made to expel them from the country they now hold. They cannot help seeing how immediate is the danger: from the American press there comes a cry, “Let us have this polygamy put down; its existence is a disgrace to England from which it springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the Federal government whose laws it outrages and defies. How long will you continue to tolerate this retrogression from Christianity, this insult to civilization?”

With the New Englanders, the question is political as well as theological, personal as well as political – political, mainly because there is a great likeness between Mormon expressions of belief in the divine origin of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Abolitionists: “Abraham was a slaveowner, and father of the faithful;” “David, the best-loved of God, was a polygamist” – “show us a biblical prohibition of slavery;” “show us a denunciation of polygamy, and we‘ll believe you.” It is this similarity of the defensive positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to the present peril of the Salt Lake Church: the New Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics, but as friends to the slaveowners; on the other hand, if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a Democrat.

Another reason for the hostility of New England is, that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon America, the American people have but little share in its existence: a few of the leaders are New Englanders and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one. In every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon finding that four come from England, two from Wales, one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one from Switzerland, and one from Prussia: from Catholic countries, none; from all America, none. It is through this purely local and temporary association of ideas that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, large-hearted churchmen eager to march their armies against a church.

If we put aside for a moment the question of the moral right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. There is no difficulty in finding legal excuses for action – no danger in backing Federal legislation with military force. The legal point is clear enough – clear upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the Territories in social matters – has, in fact, already done so. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah, but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its enforcement would be impossible, for Mormon juries will give no verdict antagonistic to their church; but it is not only in this matter that the Mormons have been offenders. They have sinned also against the land laws of America. The church, Brigham, Kimball, all are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the “Homestead” laws – unless to be forbidden; doubly, therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal Congress. There is a loophole open in the matter of polygamy – that adopted by the New York Communists when they chose each a woman to be his legal wife, and so put themselves without the reach of law. This method of escape, I have been assured by Mormon elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt. Rather than indirectly destroy their church by any such weak compliance, they would again renounce their homes, and make their painful way across the wilderness to some new Deseret.

It is not likely that New England interference will hinge upon plurality. A “difficulty” can easily be made to arise upon the land question, and no breach of the principle of toleration will, on the surface at least, be visible. No surveys have been held in the Territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial limits have been sold by the Federal land office. Not only have the limitations of the “Homestead” and “Pre-emption” laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake City, with its palace, its theater, and hotels, is built upon the public lands of the United States. On the other hand, Mexican titles are respected in Arizona and New Mexico; and as Utah was Mexican soil when, before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons settled on its wastes, it seems hard that their claims should not be equally respected.

After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occupants of the country which now forms the Territories of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and were thus annexed to the United States without being in the least degree consulted. It is true that they might be said to have occupied the country as American citizens, and so to have carried American sovereignty with them into the wilderness; but this, again, is a European, not an American theory. American citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or an organized Territory; and though the Mormons may be said to have accepted their position as citizens of the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the understanding that it should continue a Mormon country, where Gentiles should at the most be barely tolerated.

We need not go further into the mazes of public law, or of ex post facto American enactments. The Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law is against them; but say that while it is claimed that Boston and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is Boston and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain a Territory, although they admitted the less populous Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as States.

If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, there can be no doubt upon the points of law, there can be as little upon the military question. Of the fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert that we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated, and 1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt Lake City. This not only settles the military question, but is meant to do so. When men lay four miles of railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for a whole year, when a government bribes high enough to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is something more than commerce or settlement in the wind. The Pacific Railroad is not merely meant to be the shortest line from New York to San Francisco; it is meant to put down Mormonism.

If the Federal government decides to attack these peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or Mexico is their goal, and in the Marquesas or in Sonora they may, perhaps, for a few years at least, be let alone, again to prove the forerunners of English civilization – planters of Saxon institutions and the English tongue; once more to perform their mission, as they performed it in Missouri and in Utah.

When we turn from the simple legal question, and the still more simple military one, to the moral point involved in the forcible suppression of plural marriage in one State by the might of all the others, we find the consideration of the matter confused by the apparent analogy between the so-called crusade against slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy. There is no real resemblance between the cases. In the strictest sense there was no more a crusade against slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the part of a man who strikes one that bit him. The purest republicans have never pretended that the abolition of slavery was the justification of the war. The South rose in rebellion, and in rising gave New England an opportunity for the destruction in America of an institution at variance with the republican form of government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democracy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not to see that it is the most leveling of all social institutions – Mormonism the most democratic of religions. A rich man in New York leaves his two or three sons a large property, and founds a family; a rich Mormon leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable fraction of his money, and each son must trudge out into the world, and toil for himself. Brigham‘s sons – those of them who are not gratuitously employed in hard service for the church in foreign parts – are cattle-drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was the only poorly-clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and consequently all the children, are equal before the law, is a powerful engine of democracy.

The general moral question of whether Mormonism is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter-day Saints differ in certain social customs from other Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not for a traveling observer of English-speaking countries as they are. Mormonism comes under my observation as the religious and social system of the most successful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this point of view it would be an immediate advantage to the world that they should be driven out once more into the wilderness, again to found an England in Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Red River. It may be an immediate gain to civilization, but America herself was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance to all; and there are still to be found Americans who think it would be the severest blow that has been dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution at the cannon‘s mouth.

The question of where to draw the line is one of interest. Great Britain draws it at black faces, and would hardly tolerate the existence among her white subjects in London of such a sect as that of the Maharajas of Bombay. “If you draw the line at black faces,” say the Mormons, “why should you not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles from Washington?”

The moral question cannot be dissociated from Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri and Illinois, into no man‘s land, intending there to live out of the reach of those who differed from them, as do the Russian dissenters transported in past ages to the provinces of Taurida and Kherson. It is by no fault of theirs, they say, that they are citizens of the United States.

There is in the far West a fast increasing party who would leave people to be polygynists, polyandrists, Free-lovers, Shakers, or monogamists, as they please; who would place the social relations as they have placed religion – out of the reach of the law. I need hardly say that public opinion has such overwhelming force in America that it is probable that even under a system of perfect toleration by law, two forms of the family relation would never be found existing side by side. Polygamists would continue to migrate to Mormon land, Free-lovers to New York, Shakers to New England. Some will find in this a reason for, and some a reason against, a change. In any case, a crusade against Mormonism will hardly draw sympathy from Nebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas.

Many are found who say: “Leave Mormonism to itself, and it will die.” The Pacific Railroad alone, they think, will kill it. Those Americans who know Utah best are not of this opinion. Mormonism is no superstition of the past. There is huge vitality in the polygamic church. Emerson once spoke to me of Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as three religions which, right or wrong, are full of force. “The Mormons only need to be persecuted,” said Elder Frederick to me, “to become as powerful as the Mohammedans.” It is, indeed, more than doubtful whether polygamy can endure side by side with American monogamy – it is certain that Mormon priestly power and Mormon mysteries cannot in the long run withstand the presence of a large Gentile population; but, if Mormon titles to land are respected, and if great mineral wealth is not found to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be exposed to any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope with now. Settlers who can go to California or to Colorado “pares” will hardly fix themselves in the Utah desert. The Mexican table-lands will be annexed before Gentile immigrants seriously trouble Brigham. Gold and New England are the most dreaded foes of Mormondom. Nothing can save polygamy if lodes and placers such as those of all the surrounding States are found in Utah; nothing can save it if the New Englanders determine to put it down.

Were Congress to enforce the Homestead laws in Utah, and provide for the presence of an overwhelming Gentile population, polygamy would not only die of itself, but drag Mormonism down in its fall. Brigham knows more completely than we can the necessity of isolation. He would not be likely to await the blow which increased Gentile immigration would deal his power.

If New England decides to act, the table-lands of Mexico will see played once more the sad comedy of Utah. Again the Mormons will march into Mexican territory, again to wake some day, and find it American. Theirs, however, will once more be the pride of having proved the pioneers of that English civilization which is destined to overspread the temperate world. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah to the United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to Anglo-Saxondom.