not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either making the laws or executing them?  He might be a very good patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors.  But what was a man to do?  I thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went straight to him and laid the whole case before him.  He said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way through.  He examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result.  Then he made a list of the contractors’ names.  Finally he said: 

“’Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain.  These contracts are strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified.  These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open.  I see no fault or flaw anywhere.’

“Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said:  ’Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these men here at such-and-such an hour.’

“They were there, to the minute.  So was I. Mr. Young asked them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement good.  Then he said to them: 

“’You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?’

“‘Yes.’

“‘Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you!  Go!’

“And they did go, too!  They are strung across the deserts now, working like bees.  And I never hear a word out of them.

“There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here, shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government—­but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king!”

Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story.  I knew him well during several years afterward in San Francisco.

Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.

I had the will to do it.  With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—­until I saw the Mormon women.  Then I was touched.  My heart was wiser than my head.  It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—­the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—­and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”