To uphold this peculiarly constituted church, various crimes have been committed, varying in hue, but the Mountain Meadow Massacre, when one hundred and nineteen men, women and children were butchered in cold blood under a flag of truce, surpasses in atrocity any act of the savage tribes by whom they are surrounded, and has stained indelibly the Mormon church.  Before the advent of the Union Pacific Railroad, to breath a word against the church organization or any of its acts or resist one of their tenets or accumulate more wealth than was acceptable to the leaders, has always brought down instant and the severest punishment, and the perpetrators could never be brought to justice as they were emissaries of Brigham Young and his councillors.

It is polygamy, however, more than all their other deeds and revelations that has entailed misery, suffering and degradation.  It has been the parent of more crime, more disloyalty, more deceit and sin generally than all the other causes combined.  It is claimed that the revelation of polygamy came to the prophet Joseph Smith in 1843 at Nauvoo, and it was secretly practised by him and by other members of his church; but it was not published to the world until 1852, when Brigham Young made it known in Utah, thinking no doubt that he was beyond the pale of civilization and the terrors of the law.  It was not made obligatory, but those who practised it were to have greater exaltation in the next world.  A woman conforming in other respects is entitled to a seat in Heaven, but it is reserved for the polygamist to be one with the Father.  Of course there is no room for Gentiles in the Mormon Heaven, excepting as hewers of wood and drawers of water to some Mormon saint.

The fanatical followers of the priesthood are filled with the superstitions of the old world, coming, as so many do from the lowest classes of Great Britain and Scandinavia, fit subjects for all the mummery imposed upon them in the name of religion.  Brigham Young is often quoted as saying, that he had gathered around him a set of people that his satanic majesty himself would not have.  Even after polygamy had been openly proclaimed in Utah, their missionaries utterly repudiated it, and in pursuance of private orders of the prophet they positively asserted that it was not a tenet of the church.  They were afraid of bringing upon themselves the condemnation of foreign governments; but the ignorant offshoots of European Monarchies openly commit acts here, that they boast if perpetrated in their own land, would bring down upon them the severest penalties of the law.  The perfect indifference and apathy of our government for so many years, however, has given the Mormons sufficient justification for their attitude.  Abroad, not only their own security, but the large emigration which they sought and do secure yearly, rendered necessary a great deal of deceit.  Men honest and fair-dealing in other respects have a twisted conscience in regard