who own and till the soil, and who are taught to
count them aliens and persecutors. Irrigation is here the only means of
successful agriculture. It involves great outlay of capital and labor, and
creates great fixedness of tenure. Newcomers are thus additionally
discouraged.

Thus entrenched in a well-provisioned citadel, welcoming all the new levies
it can win, and amply able to provide for them, Mormonism bids fair to
make a prolonged stand. To emerge from a defensive position and strike for
unlimited sway is what it cannot, to judge by all precedents, expect. It
will be compelled, in fact, to lighten itself of some dead weights in order
to maintain its actual situation. Polygamy must go, and the absolute power
of the priesthood be modified. With some such adaptations it may continue a
reality for generations to come. And time is a great sanctifier. A creed
that lives for one or two centuries is by so much the more likely to live
longer. Youth is the critical period with religions, as with animals and
plants and nations. Through that period Mormonism is passing with
flattering success. That such a lusty juvenile will, by favor of the
mellowing effect imposed on all creeds by early years of toil, trouble and
experience, reach a middle age of presentable decency, is not a more
unlikely supposition than the worthy Vermont clergyman would have
pronounced, half a century ago, the idea that his _jeu d'esprit_ would
become the Bible of sixty thousand industrious, well-ordered
English-speaking people in the heart of the American continent.

E.C.B.

THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN IN INDIA.

According to a report sent to our Commissioner of Education at Washington
four years ago, there were then in India one thousand girls' schools
supported by the government and some five hundred missionary schools
devoted to female education. Besides these, there has sprung up during the
last few years a new field for the women-educators in that country. This is
the teaching of women in their homes. It is called _zenana-work._ The
_zenana_ is the women's apartment in the house--the _harem_ of the Turks.
Women have been sent from England and from America for this special object,
and their labors are meeting with encouraging success. They are constantly
gaining admission to new families, which from caste or other causes are
opposed to sending their young women to the regular schools. Some of the
zenana-teachers are regularly-educated physicians.