everything which they contained. The distance to be conquered by these emigrants, was equal to that from London to Lemberg, six times that from Cairo to Jerusalem. Their route lay through a prairie peopled by Pawnees, Shoshones, wolves and bears; it was broken by rapid rivers, barred by a series of mountain chains; and the haven to be reached, after all their toils and dangers, was the shores of a Dead Sea, lying in a sterile valley; a land watered with brine, and pastures sown with salt.

The tale of that journey of the Saints, as we hear it from the lips of Young, of Wells, of Taylor, and of other old men who made it, is a story to wring and yet nerve the hearts of all generous men. When these "Mormons" were driven by violence from the roofs which they had built, the fields which they had tilled, the days were short and snow lay thick upon the ground. Everything, save a little food for the wayside, a few corn-seeds and potato-roots for the coming year, had to be abandoned to their armed and riotous enemies; the homes which they had made, the temple they had just finished, the graves they had recently dug. Frost bit their little ones in the hands and feet. Hunger and thirst tormented both young and aged. Long plains of sands, into which the wagon-wheels sank to the axle-trees, separated the scanty supplies of water. Wells there were none. Mirage often mocked them with its promise; and even when they came to creeks and streams, they often found them bitter to the taste and dangerous to health. The days were short and cold, and the absence of any other shelter from the frost than the bit of canvass roof, made the nights of winter terrible to all. Horses sickened by the way. Disease broke out among the cows and sheep, so that milk ran short, and the supplies of mutton were dressed and cooked in fear. Some of the poor, the aged, and the ailing, had then to be left behind; with them a guard of young men who could ill be spared.

Nor was this loss of a part of their youth and strengh the whole of their calamity in this opening stage of their emigration. Just at the hour when every male arm was most precious to

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these exiles, the Mexican war broke out; and a government which had never been strong enough to do them right, came down to them for help in arms and men. Young answered the appeal of his country like a patriot : five hundred youths, the flower of his migrating bands, stepped out before him, and with the blessing of their chief upon their heads, they mustered themselves into the invading corps.

Weakened by the departure of this living force, the "Mormons" crossed the Missouri River in a ferry made by themselves, entered on the great wilderness, the features of which they laid down on a map, making a rough road, and throwing light bridges over streams, as they went on; collecting grass and herbs for their own use; sowing corn for those who were to come later in the year; raising temporary sheds in which their little ones might sleep; and digging caves in the earth as a refuge from the winter snow. Their food was scarce, their water bad, and such wild game as they could find in the plains, the elk, the antelope, the buffalo, poisoned their blood. Nearly all the malt whisky which they had brought from Nauvoo to correct the bad water, had been seized on the road, and the kegs staved in, by agents of government, on pretence of its being meant for the redskins, to whom it was unlawful for the whites to sell any ardent spirits. Four kegs only had been saved: saved by Brigham Young himself. who was present in the boat, and who told me the anecdote, says it is the only time he ever remembers to have seen the Prophet in a rage. Four kegs were on board the ferry, when the officer seized them and began to knock in the staves; in that spirit lay the lives of the people; and when Brigham saw the man raise his mallet, he drew his pistol, levelled it at his head, and cried, "Stay your hand! If you touch that keg, you die by the living God!" The man jumped off the ferry and troubled them no more.

An Elder,

In our journey across the plains, though the time was August, the weather fine, the passage swift, we suffered keenly from the want of fresh food and of good water. My companion sickened from bile into dysentery;

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no meat, no drink, would lie in his stomach; nothing but the cognac in our flasks. The water almost killed him. His sun-burnt face grew chalkywhite; his limbs hung feeble and relaxed; his strong physique so drooped that a man at one of the ranches, after looking at him for a moment with a curious eye, came up to me, and said, "You will feel very lonely when he is left behind." My own attack came later, and in another form. The skin of my hands peeled off, as if it had been either frayed or scraped with a knife; boils came out upon my back; a pock started on my under eye-lid; my fingers had the appearance of scorbutic eruptions.

These two diseases, Taylor told me, ravaged the camp of emigrants. Many sickened of dysentery, still more suffered from scurvy.

Some of the Saints fell back in the face of these terrible trials. More fainted by the wayside, and were mournfully laid in their desert graves. Every day there came a funeral, every night there was fresh mourning in the camp. The waste of life is always very great in the emigrant trains; even now, when the roads are made and the stations are provisioned with vegetable food. Of the train which I saw come in, six had perished on the plains. A young lady told me that eighty had died in the train by which she had arrived; forty would perhaps be an average loss in the mountains and the plains. But no subsequent train has ever suffered like the first. "The waste of life was great," said Brigham Young, as he told me the dreadful tale. Yet the brave, unbroken body of male and female Saints toiled along the frozen way. When their hearts were very low, a band of music struck up some lively air, in which the people joined, and forgot their woes. By day they sang hymns, at night they danced round the watch fires. Gloom, asperity, asceticism, they banished from their camps and from their thoughts. Among the few treasures which they had carried with them from Nauvoo was a printing press; and a sheet of news, printed and published by the wayside, carried words of good counsel into every part of the camp.

After crossing the sands and creeks which have since become known to civilized men on maps and charts as Nebraska and Dakota, they arrived at the foot of the first great range of those high and broken chains of alps which are commonly grouped together under the name of Rocky Mountains; over these high barriers there was yet no path; and the defiles leading through them were buried in drifts of snow. How the Saints toiled up these mountain-sides, dragging with them oxen and carts, foraging for food, baking their bread and cooking their meat, without help and without guides, it brings tears into the eyes of aged men to tell. The young and bold went forward in advance; driving away the bears and wolves; stoning the rattlesnakes; chasing the elk and the wild deer; making a path for the women and the old men. At length, when they had reached the summit of the pass, they gazed upon a series of arid and leafless plains, of dry river-beds, of verdureless hill-sides, of alkaline bottoms; pools of bitter water, narrow canyons and gorges, abrupt and steep. Day by day, week after week, they toiled over these bleak sierras, through these forbidding valleys. Food was running out; wild game became scarce; the Utes and Snakes were unfriendly; and at the end of their journey, should they ever reach it, lay the dry Salt desert, in which they had consented to come and dwell!

Yet they were not disheartened by these hostile aspects of the country; they had not expected a verdant paradise; they knew that the land had never been seized, because it had not been considered worth taking from the Indian tribes; they expected to find here nothing beyond peace and freedom, a place in which they could take their chance with Nature, and to which they could invite the Saints, their brethren, to a country of their own. Descending the passes with beating hearts and clanging trumpets, they entered on their lonely inheritance; marched upon this slope above the Jordan, near the conical hill on which Brigham had seen the angel in his sleep; laid down the plan of a new city; explored the canyons and watercourses into the hills; and in a few

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was in Joseph ? The hour has gone by, as Americans feel, for treating this Church in sport.

In England, though our soil is said to be the nursery of the Saints, we have not yet learned to think of "Mormonism" otherwise than as one of our many humors; as a rash that comes out from time to time in our social body; a sign, perhaps, of our occasional lack of health; no one among us has learned to regard it as the symptom of a disease which may be lying at the seat of life. Has Convocation ever given up a day to the Book of Mormon? Has a bishop ever visited the Saints in Commercial Road? Two or three ministers may have fired off pamphlets against them; but have any of these reverend fathers been to see them in their London homes? Rare, indeed, has been this holy strife even on the part of private men. But our brethren in America can hardly affect to treat the Saints in this easy style. The new Church is visible among them; for good and evil it is in their system; not a humor to be cast out like a rash upon the skin. Up to this time our own Saints have been taught to regard England as Egypt, and their own dwelling-place as exile from a brighter home. America is to them Canaan, Salt Lake City a New Jerusalem. I do not say that this is good for us, though it has an appearance of being good, since it relieves us of a painful duty, and removes from the midst of our cities a cause of shame. The poor, the aged, the feeble, among the Saints, may be left behind in our streets, to die, as they think and say, in the house of bondage; but the rich, the young, the zealous, are bound by their faith to go forward and possess themselves of the Promised Land. With the younger Saints, especially with the female Saints, a change of air is always recommended on a change of creed. Thousands emigrate, though it is also true that thousands remain behind. In London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and in other cities, the Saints have schools and chapels, books and journals, of which Oxford knows little, and Mayfair less. Not being a political sect, never asking for any right, never urging any wrong; content with doing

their work in peace; they escape notice from the press, and engage the thoughts of society as little as the Moravians and the Plymouth Brethren. In London society you may hear in any one week_more speculation about Prince and Home, the Abode of Love and the Spiritual Spheres, than you will hear about Young and Deseret in six months. The Saints are not in society; but in Boston, Washington, and New York, these "Mormons" are a fearful portent, threatening to become a formidable power. Already they have put jurists into session and armies into motion. Colfax, the Speaker, has been to confer with Young, and committees of Congress are sitting on the affairs of Utah. The day appears to be drawing nigh, when the problems which these "Mormons" put before the world may have to be considered by practical men, not in colleges and chapels only, not in senates and in courts of law only, but in the camp and in the battle-field.

A

That question of how these "Mormons" are to be dealt with by the American people, is one of the strangest riddles of an age which has bridged the ocean, put a girdle of lightning round the earth, and tamed to its service the fiery steeds of the sun. true reply may be far to seek; for we have not yet resolved, finally, how far thought is free from the control of law; and to what extent toleration of creeds implies toleration of the conduct which springs from creeds. One step in advance towards such a reply, must be an attempt to find what "Mormouism" is, and by what means it has grown. It cannot be put aside as either unmixed foolishness or unalloyed vice. Strange as the new sectarians may seem to us, they must have in their keeping some grain of truth. They live and thrive, and men who live by their own labor, thrive by their own enterprise, cannot be altogether mad. Their streets are clean, their houses bright, their gardens fruitful. Peace reigns in their cities. Harlots and drunkards are unknown among them. They keep open more common schools than any other sect in the United States. But being what they are, believing what they do, their merits are perhaps more trying to our