Polygamy, as far as I have observed, exerts a more degrading influence upon husbands that upon wives.  The love of the latter finds expression in flowers and children, while the former seem to be rendered incapable of pure love of anything.  The spirit of Mormonism is intensely exclusive and un-American.  A more withdrawn, compact, sealed-up body of people could hardly be found on the face of the earth than is gathered here, notwithstanding railroads, telegraphs, and the penetrating lights that go sifting through society everywhere in this revolutionary, question-asking century.  Most of the Mormons I have met seem to be in a state of perpetual apology, which can hardly be fully accounted for by Gentile attacks.  At any rate it is unspeakably offensive to any free man.

“We Saints,” they are continually saying, “are not as bad as we are called.  We don’t murder those who differ with us, but rather treat them with all charity.  You may go through our town night or day and no harm shall befall you.  Go into our houses and you will be well used.  We are as glad as you are that Lee was punished,” etc.  While taking a saunter the other evening we were overtaken by a characteristic Mormon, “an umble man,” who made us a very deferential salute and then walked on with us about half a mile.  We discussed whatsoever of Mormon doctrines came to mind with American freedom, which he defended as best he could, speaking in an excited but deprecating tone.  When hard pressed he would say:  “I don’t understand these deep things, but the elders do.  I’m only an umble tradesman.”  In taking leave he thanked us for the pleasure of our querulous conversation, removed his hat, and bowed lowly in a sort of Uriah Heep manner, and then went to his humble home.  How many humble wives it contained, we did not learn.

Fine specimens of manhood are by no means wanting, but the number of people one meets here who have some physical defect or who attract one’s attention by some mental peculiarity that manifests itself through the eyes, is astonishingly great in so small a city.  It would evidently be unfair to attribute these defects to Mormonism, though Mormonism has undoubtedly been the magnet that elected and drew these strange people together from all parts of the world.

But however “the peculiar doctrines” and “peculiar practices” of Mormonism have affected the bodies and the minds of the old Saints, the little Latter-Day boys and girls are as happy and natural as possible, running wild, with plenty of good hearty parental indulgence, playing, fighting, gathering flowers in delightful innocence; and when we consider that most of the parents have been drawn from the thickly settled portion of the Old World, where they have long suffered the repression of hunger and hard toil, the Mormon children, “Utah’s best crop,” seem remarkably bright and promising.

From children one passes naturally into the blooming wilderness, to the pure religion of sunshine and snow, where all the good and the evil of this strange people lifts and vanishes from the mind like mist from the mountains.