of past political conditions; the animating soul in each is the same. A common (economic) feeling has made them all akin. The burgher class has mounted the throne, and cries halt to progress. Statecraft exists, to-day, for the furtherance of economic interests; forms of government are recognized as of secondary importance to "vested interests" and commercial rights. Harrington's apophthegm: "Empire follows the balance of property," is no longer disputable. In the opening of the Slavery discussion between North and South, we trace the beginning of the inevitable conflict now upon us. The North, as representative of our transitional régime, demanded room. In the way of the extension of cheap labor stood the dear labor of slavery. The struggle between the manufacturer and the importer, dignified as "the tariff question," gave way to a deeper problem. The non-extension of slavery into the territories was not a sentimental issue, but an economic one. The manufacturing and farming class instinctively felt that their existence depended upon the result. To secure the extension of the blessings of an abstract freedom, to restrict slave labor and confine it within defined bounds, all was permissible. "The end justifies the means. means." Hence, in the name of freedom the construction of the constitution was twisted into the furtherance of power. Our fathers ate sour grapes, and we wonder that our teeth are set on edge. The anti-slavery sentiment gave the government power to secure ideal freedom and actual centralization. The North, true to the ideal, rushed to the front and established, with the non-extension and final extinction of slavery, the extension and permanence of cheap labor! And for this we display our wounds! The precedents thus formed, the forced grafts on the constitution (logically necessary), and the exigencies of our alleged commercial competition, form the justification of the " Edmunds" anti-polygamy law. Having entered upon the path of coercion, we are powerless to halt; in fact, each year increases the tendency and augments the momentum in that direction. Republican rule has shaped our history; Democracy can but administer on the legacy bequeathed. The whole Mormon system, social, religious, industrial, is essentially based on two fundamental principles: coöperation in business and arbitration in disputes. Necessarily, in the eyes of monopolyrestricted competition, this is a foe. It could be faced by no more deadly enemy. If this be true, and the following pages will contain the proof, we need not wonder that an effort should be made "to fire the popular heart," and excite animosity against a people so hostile to feeing lawyers and the cent. per cent. policy of our commercial T WHAT IS THE MORMON PROBLEM? lords. The old cry for freedom through increase of central power— But we need not waste words on polygamy, though the Utah system is well worth study. That is not the issue! That is but the gaudily-colored bait to catch the inexperienced denizens of economic waters. The issue is again an economic one-the extension of cheap labor—the cent. per cent. freedom of commercial intercourse -the control over the means of life of the many by the few, confronted in Utah by an antagonistic system of social and commercial activity. To all who believe that Co-operation and Arbitration are the key notes of a higher civilization, that they are only means by which we may be saved from "shooting Niagara " as a nation, the study of the "Mormon question" is one of imperative interest. The writer served three years to establish centralization of power at Washington, and the extension of free trade in labor at the South, under the glamour of the cry of freedom. Other fools stand ready to obey the behests of Cæsar's spirit, if need be, to again make the Republic the pathway to an Empire, their alleged minds lit by the ignis fatuus of social morality. The Mormon protest is one of deep significance to working men and women. The Eastern demand is that of Cæsar. The despised Mormon is an unconscious ally in what is not as yet a Lost Cause. As such let us endeavor to understand his position, to put ourselves in his place, before forging weapons for his opponents which will react upon us. Before giving assent to new Coercion Acts now before Congress, let us endeavor to understand Mormondom as it exists under present legislation, the spirit of the people, their institutions, and whether we are concerned in their preservation. TH CHAPTER II. CO-OPERATION. · HE exorbitant charges to which travelers in the far West are generally subjected, is a matter well known. Mormon territory is the only place west of the Rocky Mountains where there has been a systematic effort to remedy this evil. In California the growth of population has led to the diminution of prices and the restoration of the economical balance with that of the Atlantic coast; but the reform has been effected in Utah by other means. Although fair competition is fully recognized as the governing principle in trade, the remedy was projected before the growth of population rendered competition an available solution. The growth of the community had been slow and under extreme difficulties. Driven out of Ohio, Missouri and Illinois by the fanatical hatred of the mob, before polygamy was a cardinal feature in their social life, they had undertaken the hazardous task of crossing the vast alkaline plains of the great West, in hopes that in some far distant spot their wives and little ones might be free from Christian intolerance and midnight marauders. Entering the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, on what was then foreign soil and a barren desert far from civilization, they proposed to settle. There was no settlement of white men near, and they found but a few naked Indians making a meal from roasted crickets and dried grasshoppers. The few trappers they met en route laughed at the idea of a colony subsisting in such a region, and expressed grave doubts whether grain would mature. The once famous mountaineer, James Bridger, was so certain that failure alone was possible, that he offered to give a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised in the valley. Nature had limited their choice of location to places where water was accessible. On the south were extensive cactus plains; on the East the barren rocks of the Wahsatch range; on the west the great saline desert, while to the north were the volcanic lands extending down from Idaho. Irrigation had never been tried on this continent on an extensive scale, and yet without it starvation awaited them. In united action, and the holding of water as public property, lay their salvation as a community; and the interminable disputes which have arisen and the claims advanced by outsiders, actuated by private greed, have naturally tended to extend co-operation beyond the matter of irrigation. But it is not alone to natural environment that Mormon cooperation arose, for from the earliest epoch of the church Joseph Smith had made it the bulwark of the nascent church. In his eyes it was the means by which a universal social redemption was to be brought about. Fifty years ago Mormon preachers insisted that without social redemption, the millennial reign was impossible. In that early day was organized the "Order of Enoch," and it signified simply the inauguration of a society based upon a perfect co-operative order where there were to be " no poor in Zion.' This was the grand aim of Joseph Smith, and co-operation is as much a cardinal and essential doctrine of the Mormon church as baptism for the remission of sins, and every Mormon elder who understands the philosophy of his own system will affirm that without co-operation salvation remains but a dream. They entered Utah imbued with this conviction; with confident faith they sought to wrest from Nature one of her most desolate and forbidding regions. Those dreary wastes of alkaline plains and sage-brush under their efforts have given place to blooming orchards and fields of golden grain; the wigwam has been supplanted by cottages embowered in green foliage, and by thriving villages and cities. I am frank to say that I do not believe that this conquest could have been wrested from Nature by individual efforts, by settlers isolated from each other, without mutual aid and assistance; nor that this mutual aid, under such circumstances, would have been extended but for the religious bond which knit the pioneers into a common brotherhood. The obstacles to overcome were too great; nature presented too forbidding an aspect to permit of this great conquest having resulted from the unorganized and undirected labors of isolated settlers. It was a warfare upon Nature by drilled cohorts, animated by a common feeling, and therefore, accomplished what guerilla warfare would have been incapable of achieving. There was needed the unifying element of a deep moral conviction, nerving men's souls to withstand difficulties and welding individual interests together to form closer social ties. We give credit for sincerity to the bigoted Puritans, to the exiled Huguenots, to the followers of that (truly) Catholic Lord Baltimore, when they sought to found homes on this continent; but, for men who in face of far greater difficulties, and having passed through a persecution equally as relentless as any from which our forefathers fled, we are too often content to shrug our shoulders, and with a sneer say, superstition. Thirty-five years ago the co-operative social gospel of the Mormons attracted the attention and won the admiration of such socialistic apostles of England as Robert Owen, George Jacob Holyoake, and Bronterre O'Brien, the latter of whom said that the Mormons had "created a soul under the ribs of death." Such united action and cordial co-operation, in such an emergency as their advent in Utah, shows that there must have been a master mind among them, who not only possessed their confidence, but was entitled to it by the wisdom of his counsel. That such a man was Brigham Young I think is now the impartial verdict of history. From the very first, Brigham Young "set his face as a flint" against the selfish spirit of avarice governing trade under which Mormon and Gentile alike groaned, yet he has been charged with fostering that which he essentially modified. Whatever may be our opinion of his faith, however much we may dissent from his religious views, it is impossible for any intelligent man to stand beside the simple slab which lies over his final resting-place, and not to feel that there lies a man whose worthiest monument exists in the hearts of people he led, and in the living institutions his indefatigable zeal did so much to establish. Long years before co-operation became an established principle in mercantile affairs, he tried to induce the leading merchants to inaugurate a co-operative distributive system by which the necessities of life would be cheapened and the people reap the benefit. Merchants were making enormous profits. Wheat, for instance, was bought for seventy-five cents a bushel and mining camps for twenty-five dollars per hundredweight. At last a leading firm apostatized, and the channels of trade were being used against social interests. In 1856 there was a famine in Utah, and the community was barely preserved by the leading men wisely rationing the whole and dividing among the people their own substance. Utah in her early days was utterly destitute of cash; all her internal trade being conducted by barter and the due bill system. In 1864 merchants had risen to opulence. Commerce was gradually, but surely, throwing all the money to a few hands. What had been so long preached as theory, had to be realized in practice or to abandon settled convictions. It had become a question of social preservation against selfish interests. Early in 1868, the merchants were startled by the announcement "that it was advisable that the people of Utah Territory should become their own merchants;" and that an organization should be created for them expressly for im sold in the |