“I can’t see but that it would be a deal less mean to arrange it that way than to bring a race of free blacks from their own country and make every child they have a slave because he happens to be a nigger.”  She remarked that his mild blue eye lit up with the true flash of the indignation of contemplative justice.  “There’s one thing certain,” continued he, “in my Church of the Latter-Day Saints no man shall be a slave to his brother because he happens to have a black skin, for, as the Scripture says, ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin?’”

Surrounded as they were by the atmosphere of slavery, there was the resonance of true heroism, of true insight into the right, in his tone, but the reason he gave—­could it be possible that he thought that the text he quoted was an authority for his instinctive justice?  It was obvious to her that he was only a fool who walked by the light of sundry flashes of genius, but there was still the chance that the sum of idiocy and the genius might prove greater than the intelligence of common men.

He went on, “But, anyhow, it isn’t the institootion of slavery that’s come up for me to decide just here and now.  Since we have been blessed with peace and prosperity, the female converts that our missionaries have been making all over the world (whom they have kept back from coming to us, letting no unmarried female come whilst the fires of persecution were passing over us) have arrived in great numbers, and the question is, Sister Susannah, how are we to steady ’em?”

What seemed so impossible to achieve in a pioneer State had in Nauvoo actually been achieved—­the women were in excess of the men.  He had, in sober truth, a social problem to solve, and the responsibility rested alone upon him.  Brotherly love having been inculcated, the manners of the Saints were cheerful and familiar, more familiar, he said, than he desired; but after all that they had endured he was fain to lay upon them no greater burden than need be.  He appealed to her, asking if on his first release from imprisonment he had not been strict in his injunctions.

“But now,” he said, “who am I that I should be able to take care of all the young women that the Lord is sending to us from all parts of the world? or am I to deny to them the privilege of coming to live among the Lord’s people?  Am I to say to them that unless they have learning and wisdom and are perfect they shall not come?  I guess that if it had been required of me to be perfect before I came to seek salvation, I wouldn’t have come at all.  But it’s just like this—­here they are! and they are nothing but poor ignorant working girls from England and Ireland and all parts of Europe.  And am I to make nunneries to put them into?”