oms,--an arrangement of course
subversive of decency. Few people are able to purchase carpets, and
their furniture is of the coarsest and commonest kind. There are few, if
any, families which maintain servants. In that of Brigham Young, each
woman has a room assigned her, for the neatness of which she is herself
responsible;--Young's own chamber is in the rear of the office of the
President of the Church, upon the ground floor. The precise number
of the female inmates can often be computed from the exterior of the
houses. These being frequently divided into compartments, each with its
own entrance from the yard, and its own chimney, and being generally
only one story in height, the number of doors is an exact index to that
of residents.
The domestic habits of the people vary greatly according to their
nativity. Of the forty-five thousand inhabitants of the Territory, at
least one-half are immigrants from England and Wales,--the scum of the
manufacturing towns and mining districts, so superstitious as to have
been capable of imbibing the Mormon faith,--though between what is
preached in Great Britain and what is practised in America there exists
a wide difference,--and so destitute in circumstances as to have been
incapable of deteriorating their fortunes by emigration. Possibly
one-fifth are Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians. This allows a remainder of
three-tenths for the native American element. An Irishman or a German is
rarely found. Of the Americans, by far the greater proportion were born
in the Northeastern States; and the three principal characters in the
history of the Church--Smith, Young, and Kimball--all originated in
Vermont, but were reared in Western New York, a region which has been
the hot-bed of American _isms_ from the discovery of the Golden Bible to
the outbreak of the Rochester rappings. This American element maintains,
in all affairs of the Church, its natural political ascendency. Of the
twelve Apostles only one is a foreigner, and among the rest of the
ecclesiastical dignitaries the proportion is not very different.
The Scandinavian Mormons are very clannish in their disposition. They
occupy some settlements exclusively, and in Salt Lake City there is one
quarter tenanted wholly by them, and nicknamed "Denmark," just as that
portion of Cincinnati monopolized by Germans is known as "over the
Rhine." Like their English and Welsh associates, they belonged to the
lowest classes of the mechanics and p
|