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scheme is to unite the Atlantic and Pacific by way of the South Pass; and their valley must be its central station. They have already raised a "Perpetual Fund" for "the final fulfilment of the covenant made by the Saints in the Temple at Nauvoo," which " is not to cease till all the poor are brought to the Valley." All the poor still lingering behind, will be brought there; so at an early period, will the fifty thousand communicants, the Church already numbers in Great Britain, with all the other "increase among the Gentiles." Their place of rendezvous will be upon what were formerly the Pottawatamie lands. The interests of the stake have been admirably cared for. It now comprises the thriving counties of "Fremont" and "Pottawatamie,” in which the Mormons still number a majority of the inhabitants. Their chief town is growing rapidly, already boasting over three thousand inhabitants, with nineteen large merchants' stores, the mail lines and five regular steam-packets running to it, and other western evidences of prosperity; besides a fine Music Hall and public buildings, and the printing establishment of a very ably edited newspaper, The Frontier Guardian.

It is probably the best station on the Missouri for commencing the overland journey to Oregon and California; as travellers can follow directly from it the Mormon road, which, in addition to other advantages, proves to be more salubrious than those to the south of it. Large numbers are expected to arrive at this point from England during the present spring, on their way to the Salt Lake. They will repay their welcome; for every working person gained to the hive of their "Honey State" counts as added wealth. So far, the Mormons write in congratulation, that they have not among them "a single loafer, rich or poor, idle gentleman, or lazy vagabond." They are no communists; but their experience has taught them the gain of jointstock to capital, and combination to labour,—perhaps something more; for I remark they have recently made arrangements "to classify their mechanics," which is probably a step in the right direction. They will be successful manufacturers, for their vigorous land-locked industry cannot be tampered with by protection. They have no gold— they have not hunted for it; but they have found wealth of other valuable minerals: rock-salt enough to do the curing of the world,— "We'll salt the Union for you," they write, "if you can't preserve it in any other way;" perhaps coal; excellent ores of iron everywhere. They are near enough, however, to the Californian Sierra to be the chief quartermasters of its miners; and they will dig their own gold in their unlimited fields of admirably fertile land. I should only invite your incredulity, and the disgust of the Horticultural Society, by giving you certain measurements of mammoth beets, turnips,

pumpkins, and garden vegetables, in my possession. In that country where stock thrives care-free,-where a poor man's thirty-two potatoes saved can return him eighteen bushels, and two and a-half bushels of wheat sown yield three hundred and fifty bushels in a season,—or where an average crop of wheat on irrigated lands is fifty bushels to the acre; the farmer's part is hardly to be despised. Certainly it will not be under a continuance of the present prices-current of the region, wheat at four dollars the bushel, and flour twelve dollars the cwt., with a ready market.

The recent letters from Deseret interest me in one thing more. They are eloquent in describing the anniversary of the Pioneers' arrival in the Valley. It was the 24th of July; and they have ordained that that day shall be commemmorated in future, like our 21st of December, as their Forefathers' Day. The noble Walker attended as an invited guest, with two hundred of his best-dressed mounted cavaliers, who stalked their guns, and took up their places at the ceremonies and banquet, with the quiet precision of soldiers marched to mass. The Great Band was there, too, that had helped their humble hymns through all the wanderings of the wilderness. Through the many trying marches of 1846,-through the fierce winter ordeal that followed, and the long journey after over plain and mountain,-it had gone unbroken, without the loss of any of its members. As they set out from England, and as they set out from Illinois, so they all came into the Valley together, and together sounded the first glad notes of triumph when the Salt Lake City was founded. It was their right to lead the psalm of praise. Anthem, song and dance,-all the innocent and thankful frolic of the day owed them its chief zest. They never were in finer key." The people felt their sorrows ended. FAR WEST, their old settlement in Missouri, and NAUVOO; with their wealth and ease, like "Pithom and Ramses, treasure cities built for Pharaoh," went awhile forgotten. Less than four years had restored them every comfort that they needed. Their entertainment, the contribution of all, I have no doubt was really sumptuous. It was spread on broad buffet tables, about fourteen hundred feet in length, at which they took their seats by turns, while they kept them heaped with ornamented delicacies, "butter of kine, and milk, with fat of lambs, with the fat of kidneys of wheat;"" and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic, and the remembered fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely." They seem unable to dilate with too much pride upon the show it made.

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"To behold the tables," says one that I quote from literally, "to behold them filling the Bowery and all adjoining grounds, loaded with all luxuries of the fields and gardens, and nearly all the varieties that

any vegetable market in the world could produce, and to see the seats around those tables filled and refilled by a people who had been deprived of those luxuries for years by the cruel hand of oppression, and freely offering seats to every stranger within their borders, and this, too, in the Valley of the Mountains, over a thousand miles from civilization, where, two years before, naught was to be found save the wild root of the prairie and the mountain cricket; was a theme of unbounded thanksgiving and praise to the Giver of all Good, as the dawning of a day when the Children of the Kingdom can sit under their own vines and fig-trees, and inhabit their own houses, having none to make them afraid. May the time be hastened when the scattered Israel may partake of such like banquets from the gardens of Joseph !"

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BRIGHAM YOUNG'S ADDRESS TO THE SAINTS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD-MISSION OF THE TWELVE APOSTLES-THE GATHERING- UTAH TERRITORY-MORMONISM IN GREAT BRITAIN-EMIGRATION FROM LIVERPOOL-AGRICULTURE AND THE ARTS IN THE SALT LAKE VALLEY - REPORTS BY RECENT TRAVELLERS OF THE PROSPERITY OF THE NEW COLONY.

THE narrative of Colonel Kane, which has been impugned by many persons in America as giving too favourable an account of the Mormons, relates to the most important incident in the history of the sect. We have reproduced it in extenso, not only for its interest, but because it is the only consecutive account of the exodus of the Mormons, from Nauvoo to the Valley of the Salt Lake, which

has been given to the world. Colonel Kane, in a postscript to his pamphlet, reiterates the truth of all he has stated, and bears a cordial testimony to the virtues of the men with whom he made the long and painful journey through the wilderness Having now traced the rise and progress of this extraordinary religion, of which the chief incidents have been enacted in America, we enter upon a new portion of our subject, and proceed to show what the Mormons have accomplished in the Great Salt Lake Valley, the means they have adopted to gather the "Saints" into that place from all parts of the world, and the developments, both social and doctrinal, which have resulted since the Church has been under the guidance of Brigham Young and Orson Pratt.

Prior to the arrival of the several detachments of the Mormon people at the Salt Lake, the following general epistle from the council of the Twelve Apostles was addressed "to the Saints throughout the earth," from Council Bluffs, the half-way station of the long overland journey to California:

"BELOVED BRETHREN,-At no period since the organization of the Church, on the 6th of April, 1830, have the Saints been so extensively scattered, and their means of receiving information from the proper source so limited, as since their expulsion from Illinois; and the time has now arrived when it will be profitable for you to receive, by our epistle, such information and instruction as the Father hath in store, and which he has made manifest by his Spirit.

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Knowing the designs of our enemies, we left Nauvoo in February, 1846, with a large pioneer company, for the purpose of finding a place where the Saints might gather and dwell in peace. The season was very unfavourable; and the repeated and excessive rains, and scarcity of provisions, retarded our progress, and compelled us to leave a portion of the camp in the wilderness, at a place we called Garden Grove, composed of an enclosure for an extensive farm and sixteen houses, the fruits of our labour; and soon after, from similar causes, we located another place, called Mount Pisgah, leaving another portion of the camp; and after searching the route, making the road and bridges over a multitude of streams, for more than three hundred miles, mostly on lands then occupied by the Pottawatamie Indians, and since vacated in favour of the United States, lying on the south and west, and included within the boundary of Iowa, we arrived near Council Bluffs, on the Missouri River, during the latter part of June, where we were met by Captain J. Allen, from Fort Leavenworth, soliciting us to enlist five hundred men into the service of the United States. To this call of our country we promptly responded; and before the middle of July more than five hundred of the Brethren were embodied in the Mormon Battalion,' and on their march for California, by way of Fort Leavenworth, under command of Lieut.-Colonel J. Allen, leaving hundreds of waggons, teams, and families, destitute of protectors and guardians, on the open

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