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THE CITY OF THE HONEY-BEE.

Zion—Deseret—A City of Two Peoples—"Work" the watchword of Mormonism—A few facts to the credit of the Saints—The text of the Edmunds Bill—In the Mormon Tabernacle—The closing scene of the Conference.

I HAVE described in my time many cities, both of the east and west; but the City of the Saints puzzles me. It is the young rival of Mecca, the Zion of the Mormons, the Latter-Day Jerusalem. It is also the City of the Honey-bee, "Deseret," and the City of the Sunflower—an encampment as of pastoral tribes, the tented capital of some Hyksos, "Shepherd Kings"—the rural seat of a modern patriarchal democracy; the place of the tabernacle of an ancient prophet-ruled Theocracy—the point round which great future perplexities for America are gathering fast; a political storm centre—"a land fresh, as it were, from the hands of God;" a beautiful Goshen of tranquility in the midst of a troublous Egypt—a city of mystery, that seems to the ignorant some Alamut or "Vulture's Nest" of an Assassin sect; the eyrie of an "Old Man of the Mountains:"—to the well-informed the Benares of a sternly pious people; the templed city of an exacting God—a place of pilgrimage in the land of promise, the home of the "Lion of Judah," and the rallying-point in the last days of the Lost Tribes, the Lamanites, the Red Indians—the capital of a Territory in which the people, though "Americans," refuse to make haste to get rich; to dig out the gold and silver which they know abounds in their mountains; to enter the world's markets as competitors in the race of commerce—a people content with solid comfort; that will not tolerate either a beggar or a millionaire within their borders, but insist on a uniform standard of substantial well-being, and devote all the surplus to "building up of Zion," to the emigration of the foreign poor and the erection of splendid places of ceremonial worship—a Territory in which the towns are all filled thick with trees and the air is sweet with the fragrance of fruit and flowers, and the voices of birds and bees as if the land was still their wild birthright; in which meadows with herds of cattle and horses are gradually overspreading deserts hitherto the wild pashalik of the tyrant sage-brush—a land, alternately, of populous champaign and of desolate sand waste, with, as its capital, a City of Two Peoples between whom there is a bitterness of animosity, such as, in far-off Persia, even Sunni and Shea hardly know.

Indeed, there are so many sides to Salt Lake City, and so much that might be said of each, that I should perhaps have shirked this part of my experiences altogether were I not conscious of possessing, at any rate, one advantage over all my "Gentile" predecessors who have written of this Mecca of the West. For it was my good fortune to be entertained as a guest in the household of a prominent Mormon Apostle, a polygamist, and in this way to have had opportunities for the frankest conversation with many of the leading Mormons of the territory. My candidly avowed antipathy to polygamy made no difference anywhere I went, for they extended to me the same confidence that they would have done to any Gentile who cared to know the real facts.

In the ordinary way, I should begin by describing the City itself. But even then, so subtle is the charm of this place—Oriental in its general appearance, English in its details—that I should hesitate to attempt description. Its quaint disregard of that "fine appearance" which makes your "live" towns so commonplace; its extravagance in streets condoned by ample shade-trees; its sluices gurgling along by the side-walks; its astonishing quiet; the simple, neighbourly life of the citizens—all these, and much more combine to invest Salt Lake City with the mystery that is in itself a charm.

Speaking merely as a traveller, and classifying the towns which I have seen, I would place the Mormon Zion in the same genus as Benares on the Ganges and Shikarpoor in Sinde, for it attracts the visitor by interests that are in great part intellectual. The mind and eye are captivated together. It is a fascination of the imagination as well as of the senses. For the capital of Utah is not one of Nature's favourites. She has hemmed it in with majestic mountains, but they are barren and severe. She has spread the levels of a great lake, but its waters are bitter, Marah. There is none of the tender grace of English landscape, none of the fierce splendour of the tropics; and yet, in spite of Nature, the valley is already beautiful, and in the years to come may be another Palmyra. As yet, however, it is the day of small things. Many of the houses are still of adobe, and they overlook the trees planted to shade them. Wild flowers still grow alongside the track of the tram-cars, and wild birds perch to whistle on the telephone wires in the business thoroughfares.

But the future is full of promise, for the prosperity of the city is based upon the most solid of all foundations, agricultural wealth, and it is inhabited by a people whose religion is work. For it is a fact about Mormonism which I have not yet seen insisted upon, that the first duty it teaches is work, and that it inculcates industry as one of the supreme virtues.

The result is that there are no pauper Mormons, for there are no idle ones. In the daytime there are no loafers in the streets, for every man is afield or at his work, and soon after nine at night the whole city seems to be gone to bed. A few strangers of course are hanging about the saloon doors, but the pervading stillness and the emptiness of the streets is dispiriting to rowdyism, and so the Gentile damns the place as being "dull." But the truth is that the Mormons are too busy during the day for idleness to find companionship at night, and too sober in their pleasures for gaslight vices to attract them.

As a natural corollary to this life of hard work, it follows that the Mormons are in a large measure indifferent to the affairs of the world outside themselves. Minding their own business keeps them from meddling with that of others. They are, indeed, taught this from the pulpit. For it is the regular formula of the Tabernacle that the people should go about their daily work, attend to that, and leave everything else alone. They are never to forget that they are "building up Zion," that their day is coming in good time, but that meanwhile they must work "and never bother about what other people may be doing." In this way Salt Lake City has become a City of Two Peoples, and though Mormon and Gentile may be stirred up together sometimes, they do not mingle any more than oil and water.

There are no paupers among the Mormons, and 95 per cent of them live in their own houses on their own land; there is no "caste" of priesthood, such as the world supposes, inasmuch as every intelligent man is a priest, and liable at any moment to be called upon to undertake the duties of the priests of other churches—but without any pay.

Last winter there was a census taken of the Utah Penitentiary and the Salt Lake City and county prisons with the following result:—In Salt Lake City there are about 75 Mormons to 25 non-Mormons: in Salt Lake county there are about 80 Mormons to 20 non-Mormons. Yet in the city prison there were 29 convicts, all non-Mormons; in the county prison there were 6 convicts all non-Mormons. The jailer stated that the county convicts for the five years past were all anti-Mormons except three!

In Utah the proportion of Mormons to all others is as 83 to 17. In the Utah Penitentiary at the date of the census there were 51 prisoners, only 5 of whom were Mormons, and 2 of the 5 were in prison for polygamy, so that the 17 per cent "outsiders" had 46 convicts in the penitentiary, while the 83 per cent. Mormons had but 5!

Out of the 200 saloon, billiard, bowling alley and pool-table keepers not over a dozen even profess to be Mormons. All of the bagnios and other disreputable concerns in the territory are run and sustained by non-Mormons. Ninety-eight per cent of the gamblers in Utah are of the same element. Ninety-five per cent of the Utah lawyers are Gentiles, and 98 per cent of all the litigation there is of outside growth and promotion. Of the 250 towns and villages in Utah, over 200 have no "gaudy sepulchre of departed virtue," and these two hundred and odd towns are almost exclusively Mormon in population. Of the suicides committed in Utah ninety odd per cent are non-Mormon, and of the Utah homicides and infanticides over 80 per cent are perpetrated by the 17 per cent of "outsiders."

The arrests made in Salt Lake City from January 1, 1881, to December 8, 1881, were classified as follows:—

Men	782
Women	200
Boys	38
Total	1020

Mormons—Men and boys	163
Mormons—Women	6
Anti-Mormon—Men and boys	657
Anti-Mormon—Women	194
Total	1020

A number of the Mormon arrests were for chicken, cow, and water trespass, petty larceny, &c. The arrests of non-Mormons were 80 per cent for prostitution, gambling, exposing of person, drunkenness, unlawful dram-selling, assault and battery, attempt to kill, &c.

Now, if the 75 per cent Mormon population of Salt Lake City were as lawless and corrupt as the record shows the 25 per cent non-Mormons to be, there would have been 2443 arrests made from their ranks during the year 1881, instead of 169; while if the 25 per cent non-Mormon population were as law-abiding and moral as the 75 per cent Mormons, instead of 851 non-Mormon arrests during the year, there would have been but 56!

These are the kind of statistics that non-Mormons in Salt Lake City hate having published. But the world ought to know them, if only to put to shame the so-called Christian community of Utah, that is never tired of libelling, personally and even by name, the men and women whom Mormons have learned to respect from a lifetime's experience of the integrity of their conduct and the purity of their lives—the so-called "Christian" community that is afraid to hear itself contrasted with these same Mormons, lest the shocking balance of crime and immorality against themselves should be publicly known. But there is no appeal from these statistics. They are incontrovertible.

The time at which I arrived in Utah was a very critical one for the Latter-Day Saints. The States, exasperated into activity by sectarian agitation—and by the intrigues of a few Gentiles resident in Utah who were financially interested in the transfer of the Territorial Treasury from Mormon hands to their own—had just determined, once more, to extirpate polygamy, and the final passage of the long-dreaded "Edmunds Bill" had marked down Mormons as a proscribed people, and had indicted the whole community for a common offence.

The following is the text of this remarkable bill:—

"Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That section 5352 of the Revised Statutes of the United States be, and the same is hereby, amended so as to read as follows, namely:

"Every person who has a husband or wife living who, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter marries another, whether married or single, and any man who hereafter simultaneously, or on the same day, marries more than one woman, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, is guilty of polygamy, and shall be punished by a fine of not more than $500 and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; but this section shall not extend to any person by reason of any former marriage whose husband or wife by such marriage shall have been absent for five successive years, and is not known to such person to be living, and is believed by such person to be dead, nor to any person by reason of any former marriage which shall have been dissolved by a valid decree of a competent court, nor to any person by reason of any former marriage which shall have been pronounced void by a valid decree of a competent court, on the ground of nullity of the marriage contract.

"SEC. 2—That the foregoing provisions shall not affect the prosecution or punishment of any offence already committed against the section amended by the first section of this act.

"SEC. 3—That if any male person, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter cohabits with more than one woman, he shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour, and on conviction thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $300, or by imprisonment for not more than six months, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.

"SEC. 4—That counts for any or all of the offences named in sections one and two of this act may be joined in the same information or indictment.

"SEC. 5—That in any prosecution for bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful cohabitation, under any statute of the United States, it shall be sufficient cause of challenge to any person drawn or summoned as a juryman or talesman, first, that he is or has been living in the practice of bigamy, polygamy or unlawful cohabitation with more than one woman, or that he is or has been guilty of an offence punishable by either of the foregoing sections, or by section 5352 of the Revised Statutes of the United States, or the Act of July 1st, 1862, entitled, 'An Act to punish and prevent the practice of polygamy in the territories of the United States and other places, and disapproving and annulling certain Acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah;' or second, that he believes it right for a man to have more than one living and undivorced wife at the same time, or to live in the practice of cohabiting with more than one woman; and any person appearing or offered as a juror or talesman, and challenged on either of the foregoing grounds, may be questioned on his oath as to the existence of any such cause of challenge, and other evidence may be introduced bearing upon the question raised by such challenge; and this question shall be tried by the court. But as to the first ground of challenge before mentioned, the person challenged shall not be bound to answer if he shall say upon his oath that he declines on the ground that his answer may tend to criminate himself; and if he shall answer as to said first ground, his answer shall not be given in evidence in any criminal prosecution against him for any offence named in sections one or three of this Act; but if he declines to answer on any ground, he shall be rejected as incompetent.