g as hewers of
wood and drawers of water to some Mormon saint.

The fanatical followers of the priesthood are filled with the
superstitions of the old world, coming, as so many do from the lowest
classes of Great Britain and Scandinavia, fit subjects for all the
mummery imposed upon them in the name of religion. Brigham Young is
often quoted as saying, that he had gathered around him a set of people
that his satanic majesty himself would not have. Even after polygamy had
been openly proclaimed in Utah, their missionaries utterly repudiated
it, and in pursuance of private orders of the prophet they positively
asserted that it was not a tenet of the church. They were afraid of
bringing upon themselves the condemnation of foreign governments; but
the ignorant offshoots of European Monarchies openly commit acts here,
that they boast if perpetrated in their own land, would bring down upon
them the severest penalties of the law. The perfect indifference and
apathy of our government for so many years, however, has given the
Mormons sufficient justification for their attitude. Abroad, not only
their own security, but the large emigration which they sought and do
secure yearly, rendered necessary a great deal of deceit. Men honest and
fair-dealing in other respects have a twisted conscience in regard to
plural marriage. As a Mormon woman said, "A polygamist is the most
ingenious liar imaginable." In the earlier days on their arrival in
Zion, when securely in the toils, their money in the hands of the
elders, too far in the wilderness to make hope of return possible, these
people have awakened to the horrors of the system, and women on the day
of their arrival were hurried to the Endowment House to swell the number
of polygamic wives in the land. Perhaps of all the women in Utah those
who live in constant terror of their husbands entering polygamy are the
most to be pitied. These plural marriages are performed in private in
the Endowment House, a building in the same enclosure with the
Tabernacle and Temple. Here they take oaths of allegiance to the church
that absolve them from obedience to the laws of our country, when they
conflict with their laws. They consider their obligations to their
religion such that they perjure themselves on the witness stand in the
most unblushing manner. They thus defeat the attempts to gain evidence
of their marriages. Apostates, since the protection given to them by
United States troops and the mo