pounds, of which the Lehi and Ogden factories furnished 14,000,000 pounds.

Mercantile. In accordance with the principle of fostering home industries, coöperative institutions have arisen among the Mormons. They were primarily due, however, to the exorbitant prices in those early days, for even the ordinary commodities. The establishment of the institutions was to give consumers cheaper rates. Wheat that was bought in one place for seventy-five cents per bushel was turned into flour, and sold in isolated mining-camps for twenty-five dollars per hundred weight.

In 1864 merchants had risen to opulence, and commerce was gradually, but surely, throwing all money into a few hands. Early in 1868, says Lum, "the merchants were startled by the announcement, that it was advisable that the people of Utah territory should become their own merchants, and that an organization should be created for them, expressly for importing and distributing merchandise on a comprehensive plan. Although in the prosecution of this work the church was threatened with a formidable schism, yet Brigham Young never faltered. It was an economic, rather than a religious, heresy which he had to confront. In Mormon society the two elements of organization-the social and the religious-have ever been combined, and it was to prevent their threatened divorce that this step became necessary."

Then followed the organization of the "Zion Coöperative Mercantile Instititution," the intention being that it should be the supreme importing-house of the people, for the territory, and that auxiliaries of local organization, for distribution, should be formed in every colony or settlement.

By reason of the funds needed for the local institution, few Mormons were financially able to join the parent organization, which, therefore, fell into the control of a very few individuals. When, in 1870, the company was incor

porated, there were but twenty-one stockholders, and, of the $199,000 of stock then taken, four men held $177,200' worth, and these, the President of the Church, Brigham Young, and one associate, held $156,200-almost threefourths of the entire stock.

Some individuals have referred to Mormonism as an exemplification of the principle of coöperation. But "the institution critically considered is not coöperative, but an ordinary joint stock company, with the tremendous leverage of church authority." "Trade with and sustain your friends," said Young in preaching. "Let your enemies have none of your substance with which to work your downfall." This coöperative organization, therefore, has proved itself to be but another bond by which the Mormon hierarchy has held in subjection the people. It can be shown that its offices have been continuously held by the same men that filled the offices of the Mormon Church.

As to the financial success of the institution, there can be no question. Its annual sales now reach a figure somewhere between four and five millions; the pay-roll averages $20,000 per month; the freight-bill is nearly $300,000 per annum. During twenty-one years of its existence, including the year 1891, the sales aggregated $69,146,881.06, and up to May, 1892, it had paid in cash dividends, $2,059,874.07.

"Many of the local coöperative stores have limited their dividends," writes a Mormon, "retaining a part of the profits made each six months, in order to extend by coöperation industrial and manufacturing facilities; so that furniture, lumber, shoe factories, tanneries, butcher shops, dairies, grist mills, and other industries, have been inaugurated and built up slowly, but effectually, from the nucleus of the original store."

It would be misleading to leave the impression that the people do not profit by this coöperation. They do gain an

advantage; "but it is so far out of proportion that the amazing success of the Mormon enterprises is no criterion of what free, industrial coöperation can accomplish. It does, however, furnish a field wherein the economic value of religion and morality may be studied." These stores could never have achieved their success had there not been confidence, on the part of the people, as to the trustworthiness of their leaders. The entire Mormon mercantile system is really dependent upon that larger religious system, which gives the peculiar character to the Mormon people.

Mormonism is thus seen to be essentially a social religion, and in this fact we find a great part of its strength. Divorced from the practical affairs of everyday living, Mormonism could never gain many adherents. The peculiar doctrines and beliefs are repellant, rather than convincing, to the human reason. But when these doctrines and beliefs apparently bear fruit in social conditions wherein brotherly love is supposedly practiced to a greater extent than in average Christian communities, the crude theological statements lose their repulsive character. The promise of better economic conditions is a potent factor in the argument which persuades the poor and ignorant classes to adopt Mormonism. Proselytes among intelligent people are rare. How the intelligent class of Mormons retain their faith in the sensual conceptions of Mormonism can be explained only by the fact of the almost inexorable character of early teaching and training on the human mind. Men are but children of a larger growth; and, so long as children are thoroughly indoctrinated with the tenets of the Mormon faith, so long will this religion have adherents. The only effective means for the overthrow of this unwholesome sect is the wider diffusion of education.

ARTICLE III.

THE LATEST TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.

BY HENRY M. WHITNEY.

II.

AIMS AND RESULTS.

WHAT especial improvements do the American Revisers think that they have made? Do their changes make a total that justifies their challenge to the attention of the English-speaking world? And what is there that they did not do and that still invites the doing?

Doubtless the best beginning for the answer to these questions may be found in the prefaces that they have given with the two Testaments.

1. The primary and most summary statement is their own, that they have embodied in the text all but a few of the American suggestions of change that in the Revision of 1885 were relegated by the English Committee to an appendix. In the Revision of 1901 the terms of that appendix are simply reversed: the American suggestions lead, and the readings preferred by the Englishmen are given with equal fullness and emphasis as having been displaced. Here the issue is frankly joined: which list will have the final verdict from those who are competent to judge?

It might easily have been, that, although the judgment went, on the whole, to the later Revision, yet a large percentage of the American suggestions would fail to commend themselves to American opinion or sentiment; but we believe it to be a fact, that, among such Americans as know the Bible intimately and have made themselves acquainted with the appendix of 1885, there are very few

who do not hold that the use of substantially all the American preferences would have been then, and is now, an excellent thing. To them it has always been hard to comprehend how our English friends could have thought it wise to cling to so many expressions that (1) by shift of meaning had become less dignified or even coarse, or (2) had changed to a different though not a coarse significance, or (3) had gone wholly out of use. So nearly absolute a difference must be at bottom a matter of national temperament, the greater separation of the English scholar, in fact and in sympathy, from the actual life of the multitude, the idea that the vocabulary of religion may well be broadly differentiated from the vocabulary of other high thought and feeling.

It was truly said by Southey: "There is, as you must have heard Wordsworth point out, a language of pure intelligible English, which was spoken in Chaucer's time and is spoken in ours, equally understood then and now, of which the Bible is the written and permanent standard, as it has undoubtedly been the great means of preserving it"; but this does not alter the fact that the English language is changing all the time, that Chaucer can be read only with almost constant reference to a glossary, that in many cases Shakespeare's thought is just missed by even the serious reader,' and that the Bible of 1611, being cast by intention in a diction even then archaic,.has in two hundred and ninety-one years, in spite of constant use, changed in hundreds of cases, so that, when heard or read without gloss, it fails to be understood.

There are, to be sure, multitudes of religious people who

1E.g.: "A station [attitude] like the herald Mercury,

New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill" (Ham. iii. 4. 58). "Fear boys with bugs" (T. of S. i. 2. 211).

For the latter of these we leave the uninitiated reader the amusement of the surprise that he will experience on looking up the meaning for himself.