to Congress the
purchase of a thousand camels for military purposes, he would have
attributed the fancy to excited nerves or a too hearty dinner. Had he
dreamed, further, that the grotesque mounted corps was to be employed
in regions two thousand miles beyond the frontier of the Anglo-Saxon
pioneer of 1789, to guard travel to an actual El Dorado, the vision
would have appeared still more extraordinary. And its absurdity would
have seemed complete, if he had fancied the high road of this travel
as leading through a community essentially Oriental in its social and
political life, which was nevertheless ripening into a State of the
American Union. Yet if General Knox could be roused from his grave at
Thomaston, he would see the dream realized. On the Pacific lies El
Dorado; among the fastnesses of the Rocky Mountains there is a community
which blends the voluptuousness of Bagdad with the economy of Cape Cod;
and within two years a regiment of camel-riders will be scouring the
Great American Plains after Cheyennes, Navajoes, and Camanches.

The propagation of the religion of which Joseph Smith was the prophet
has just begun to attract the notice its extraordinary success
deserves. So long as the head of the Mormon Church was considered a kind
of Mahometan Sam Slick, and his associates a crazy rabble, it was vain
to expect that the whole sect could be treated with more attention than
any of the curiosities in a popular museum. But a juster appreciation of
the constitution of the Mormon community begins to prevail, and with it
comes a conviction that questions are involved in its relations to the
parent government which are not exceeded in importance by any that have
ever been agitated at Washington. Brigham Young no longer seems to the
American public a religious mountebank, only one grade removed from the
man Orr, who claimed to be the veritable Angel Gabriel, and was killed
in a popular commotion which he had himself excited in Dutch Guiana. On
the contrary, he begins to appear as a man of great native strength and
scope of mind, who understands the phases of human character and knows
how to avail himself of the knowledge, and who has acquired spiritual
dominion over one hundred and fifty thousand souls, combined with
absolute temporal supremacy over fifty thousand of the number.

The situation of the Mormon community in Utah has been peculiarly
adapted, heretofore, to the eccentricities of its inhabitants. Isolated
from