THE MORMONS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."
Sra,—Having recently returned from a visit to Salt Lake City, I read your article on the Latter-Day Saints in the Spectator of October 4th with much interest, and am at this moment engaged in an effort to bring the "real inwardness " of• Mormonism before our people at home, for a very large propor- tion of the victims of this system are importations from England and Scotland. Missionaries, supplied with letters of credit, enter our towns and hamlets, and induce poor ignorant people to accept free tickets to Utah, withholding from them, until it is too late, the fate which awaits the daughters of the household. I have read many letters since my return to England, respecting relatives thus "tempted to the New Jerusalem ;" in the East End of London agents are at work at this moment alluring numbers of young people to emigrate to Salt Lake City, in the hope of finding there a land where every man owns his own house and lives in perfect freedom, secure of temporal advantages in this life, and certain of a crown of glory in the world to come.
Any one who has had the opportunity of seeing the hopeless -degradation involved by the hateful system of polygamy, of hearing from the lips of the very women whose lives have been blighted by it, the history of their martyrdom, will feel as I do the necessity of taking some step to expose the impositions by which our people are now suffering, and I shall be glad to receive communications from those who will co-operate in this movement.
Mr. Blaine — the present Republican candidate for the Presidency—has for years been very firm in his denunbiations -of this "twin relic of barbarism ;" and as the Mormon Church has no politics outside of its own interests, the Latter-Day Saints have become Democratic to a man ! It is to be hoped that Mr. Blaine, who discussed with Brigham Young the system of polygamy with a frankness no other public man had dared to use while on the Prophet's own ground, will, if elected, deal with this matter in a thoroughly practical way.
Too many grave interests are involved to admit of treating it from a jesting point of view; but let me, in reply to the millinery suggestion, tell you how Mormon ingenuity once checkmated an effort in that very direction. Mrs. Stenhonse—an "apostate Mormon "—whose acquaintance I made in San Francisco this spring, told me that she started, a few years ago, a millinery business in Salt Lake City, before she had forsaken the com- munion. A bonnet was ordered for Brigham's favourite wife ; subsequently she had orders to make bonnets for all his wives. When the bill, which amounted to 275 dollars, was presented, the poor woman found that the wily prophet had ordered "that the amount should be credited against her for tithing."—I am,
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