corresponding to counties
in a State, but with these it is not necessary to deal.

Practically all of these men under Brigham Young were polygamists. They
constituted what one of their number once called the "elite class" of
the community. To attain this rank one usually had to show ability, and
attaining the rank he was quite certain to enter into or extend his
already existing plural-marriage relations. These rulers were looked
upon with great reverence. Brigham Young, besides being a prophet of
God, as they believed, had led them through the greatest march of the
ages. His nod became almost superhuman in its significance. His frown
was as terrible to them as the wrath of God. He upheld all the members
of the polygamistic and governing class by his favoritism toward them.
He supremely, and they subordinately, ruled the community as if they
were a king and a house of peers, with no house of commons. Not
elsewhere in the United States, and not in any foreign country where
civilization dwells, has there been such a complete mastery of man over
modern men. The subordinates and the mass would perform the slightest
will of Brigham Young. When he was not present the mass would perform
the will of any of the subordinates speaking in his name. Below this
privileged class stood the common mass. It had its various gradations of
title, but, with the exception of rare instances of personal power,
there was equality in the mass. For instance, as business was a part of
their system, the local religious authority in some remote part might be
the business subordinate of some other man of less ecclesiastical rank,
with the result that this peculiar intermingling kept them all
practically upon one level of social order; and the man who made adobes
under the hot sun of the desert through all the week might still be the
religious superior of the richest man in the local community, and they
met on terms of equality and friendship. Their children might
intermarry, the difference in wealth being countervailed by a difference
in ecclesiastical authority.

It was a strange social system, this, with Brigham Young and his coterie
of advisers, to the number of twenty-six, standing at the head,
self-perpetuating, the chief being able to select constantly to fill the
ranks as they might be depleted by death; and all these ruling over one
solid mass of equal caste who thought that the rulers were animated by
divine revelation, holding the right to