The Edmunds bill is a step towards the abolishment of polygamy.  It has disfranchised the law-breakers but has not had the effect of discouraging plural marriages.  Some Gentiles maintain that there are as many solemnized now as before the passage of the bill, and the Commission itself acknowledges that the practice still exists, though they think there is a decrease.

However this may be, it is certainly true that strenuous efforts were made immediately upon its adoption to force young people into polygamy; and at the late conferences addresses were delivered enjoining upon the people the fact that, the Kingdom of God could not progress unless they obeyed the revelation given to Joseph Smith at Nauvoo, and God would never forgive his people if they did not obey his commands.  While these sentiments were freely expressed in the Tabernacle, a statement is sent to the eastern papers by a prominent member of the church that “the Edmunds Bill has practically abolished polygamy.”

To overthrow this theocratic government and to parry the subtle wiles of the priesthood, more than ordinary attention and wisdom will be required, and it will be a great triumph to our legislators if they can succeed in bringing about a peaceable solution of the greatest problem now before the American people.

* * * * *

ELIZABETH.[1]

A ROMANCE OF COLONIAL DAYS.

By Frances C. Sparhawk, Author of “A Lazy Man’s Work.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

A CASE OF CONSCIENCE.

The stars had not begun to pale in the morning twilight when Elizabeth awakened.  The dim outlines of houses and trees could be seen through the window as she looked out against the sky.  Within the room the furniture, large and heavy, looked still larger in the darkness.  She fixed her eyes upon some point, and followed back the lines that flowed from it until they were lost in the dimness, and this assured her that she was awake.  Her writing-table was in part sharply outlined against the window, and part of it was lost in the shadow of the draperies.  The bureau seemed only a dark mass among the shadows in force in the corners of the room.

These and the tops of the heavy chairs, as she looked at one and another of them, helped to calm her and give her a sense of reality.  But they in no way accounted for the startling suggestion, that whether dream or waking thought had first filled her with fear and then set her heart beating hard as she lay wide awake breathing unevenly and striving to learn if she were still under the influence of a dream, or if the unconscious conviction which had come upon her was the result of dwelling upon what she knew.  She could not recall her dreams, but they seemed to her to have had no connection with the sudden sense of danger that had startled her awake.  She tried