In rising before you, brethren and sisters, this afternoon, I desire
to commit myself unto the Lord, invoking His blessing upon the
congregation, and that the Holy Spirit may dictate that which may be
spoken to our edification and encouragement in welldoing.
In the providence of God His people are located in the valleys of the
Rocky Mountains, midway between the oceans, occupying the position of
a city set upon a hill which cannot be hid. It was the providences of
God around about His people which brought them to this land,
which led them out of—what shall I say? out of bondage?—perhaps that
is not quite the phrase to use—but which led them out of the older
States of America, where persecution had followed the Saints from
their earliest history, across the great plains, guided by the prayer
of faith and the inspiration of the Almighty, manifested through
President Brigham Young and his brethren, who counseled and guided the
people hitherward, and planted their feet in the valleys of the Rocky
Mountains. It was not our seeking. As President George A. Smith once
quaintly remarked: "We came to this country willingly, because we were
obliged to."
When persecuted in the State of New York, the early churches fled to
Ohio—established themselves on the "western reserve" —the northern
part
of Ohio—located a Stake of Zion—built a temple unto the Lord in
Kirtland, from which Elders were sent out into all parts of America,
and into Europe. Persecuted in those regions, most of them emigrated
westward and located in Missouri, where several Stakes of Zion were
organized, and again foundations were laid for a temple, and the
Twelve, with others of the Priesthood, were commanded of the Lord to
take their departure to the nations of Europe and other parts of the
globe, to preach the Gospel. Persecutions arose in that land, and
became more general than any persecutions that had preceded them,
until the State became embroiled, and an executive order was issued by
the then Governor Lilburn W. Boggs, who directed his principal
generals and aides-de-camp to gather together the militia of the
State, and expel the Saints from the State. And in this executive
order this remarkable phrase was used; speaking of the Mormon people
it said: "They must be exterminated or driven from the State." Strange
that in a republic like ours, a country of law and government, such an
executive order should appear. But it is beyond dispute; it has passed
into history; the annals of the State attest it; and the result of
such an order is well known in the history of this people. They were
not exterminated, but they were driven from the State. Time would fail
me to tell of the tears, the sorrow of women and children, when
husbands and fathers and brothers were dragged to prison, or compelled
to flee and to make their escape in various ways, through the
wilderness of the Great West, through the then unsettled regions of
northern Missouri and Iowa, until they found a stopping place on
either side of the Mississippi, in Hancock County, Illinois, and in
Lee County, Iowa; these places becoming rallying places, temporarily,
for the Latter-day Saints, where the banner of truth was again
unfurled, and the Saints began to establish themselves in those, at
that time, almost entirely unsettled regions. In the short space of
seven years they had increased to tens of thousands, and established
several Stakes of Zion on both sides of the Mississippi, with the
beautiful city of Nauvoo as the center of their operations and the
site of the new temple. It was here that the ire of the people both of
Illinois and Missouri was aroused against the Saints—especially the
ire of the surrounding counties, both in Illinois and Iowa—until it
became evident that the Saints must again take up the line of march to
some other unsettled region. Of the history of the persecutions that
followed in 1845-6; the martyrdom of the Prophets Joseph and
Hyrum, as also the slaughter of many other individuals; the burning of
houses, of granaries, of haystacks, of grain stacks, the property of
the Saints from outside settlements near Nauvoo, and of the consequent
combination of nine counties to make a descent upon Nauvoo, and the
expulsion of the Saints from the city—all these things, I say, are
matters of history. And while the people of the State in their
organized capacity sought to screen themselves from the direct
responsibility of those events under various pretenses, yet the
covering was "too thin" from the fact that the then Governor Ford, of
Illinois, was really aiding and abetting all those movements; he did
nothing to restrain them, but everything to encourage them, and in
this way the stain of these things—the death of the Prophets and the
expulsion of the Saints—was fastened upon the government of the State.
However much some honorable persons in the State may have opposed
these things, yet there was not influence and power enough in the
State to intervene for the protection of the Saints in the enjoyment
of their civil and religious rights. Thus they were compelled to
retire, and their march was westward into these mountains.
All this had been predicted by the Prophet Joseph. The Saints had been
looking forward to the accomplishment of those events. They were not
altogether unlooked for, however much the necessity was deplored and
however great were the sufferings of individuals and families, and the
community as a whole, in their travels for a distance of nearly 1,500
miles across the then barren trackless desert.
The history of the pioneers and the many people that followed, and the
privations of the early years in the settlement of the Saints in these
Rocky Mountains, are also matters of history. I would that they were
compiled in a succinct and lucid history, that our children might
peruse the same and not forget the scenes through which their fathers
have passed; for they are wonderful. There are many now living who
passed through these events; they were personal sharers in them; but
the great mass of the present generation know nothing of them, only as
they are occasionally referred to by their fathers.
It is therefore quite true what President George A. Smith said, "that
we came to this country willingly because we were obliged to." It
seemed to have been the course marked out before us, and circumstances
so surrounded and pressed upon us, that we were not able to avoid it,
although we fain would have avoided it, if we could.
Prior to the full determination upon moving westward, President
Brigham Young and the Twelve joined in communications to all the
Governors of the several States east of the Rocky Mountains, imploring
them and their Legislatures for some word of comfort, of consolation,
of tacit permission for the Saints to find shelter and protection at
the hands of their respective governments. These official
communications, made to every State and State legislature in the land,
received but very slight consideration. From a portion of them no
answers were received at all, and those who did deign to answer those
communications answered them evasively, without any hearty expressions
of welcome, or any intimation that they would use their influence to
maintain the rights, privileges and immunities of citizens. In short, the cold shoulder was turned towards the Saints from every
quarter, and immediately in front was the combined mob of nine
counties, waging war against them, backed up secretly by the powers of
the State—or at least there was no effort on the part of the State to
restrain the actions of the mob. President Young and other Elders and
the people were harassed continually by vexatious law suits. They
were pressed on every hand. Their enemies desired to involve them in
trouble. They sought to imprison our leading men. And though, at a
council held in October, 1845, between the Twelve and the leaders of
the opposition, including representatives of the State—the principal
general of that district, the circuit judge of that district—Stephen
A. Douglas, subsequently a Senator of the United States, and
presidential aspirant—I say, notwithstanding that it was stipulated at
that council, that if we would in good faith go to and make the
necessary preparations for our departure westward, as soon as the
grass grew in the spring, to enable our teams to live, we should be
protected and the mobocratic spirit restrained until we could take our
departure—our agreement and pledge to accept these conditions only
seemed to embolden the more rabid of our enemies in the counties round
about, and instead of respecting these conditions, agreed to by the
dignitaries of the State for our protection during winter, they
commenced to oppress and harass and war against us to such an extent,
that we were compelled to take up our march in the dead of winter.
Early in February, multitudes of the people commenced to cross the
Mississippi, and form their encampments in the forests of Iowa,
preparatory to starting out upon their long and dreary march across
the desert. In regard to the terrible sufferings that followed—the
terrible snow storms and rains that continued from February until May,
causing such floods and mire, distress and suffering and consequent
sickness, as perhaps has never before been known to the lot of man
under similar circumstances—they were at least such as none can
properly depict or comprehend, but those who passed through them. Of
the many that were laid by the wayside before reaching these valleys
of the mountains, those families who were decimated must be left to
tell the tale. The history of those early days of persecution and
suffering will never be fully known. But in the midst of it all a
goodly number of the people of God were sustained by their faith and
the overruling providence of Jehovah, and were brought safely through;
while the weaker and more doubtful, the fearful and unbelieving,
scattered into the surrounding country, left the body of the Saints,
drifted up and down the Mississippi into the various towns of
Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, and back into the Eastern States, while
others of the poor and less able, though earnest in the faith and
abiding in the truth, were left by the wayside, at the way stations
that were planted between the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers,
where farms were opened, grain and vegetables planted for the poor,
until they reached a general place of rendezvous on the Missouri
River, at Council Bluffs, where the Mormon Battalion enlisted for the
Mexican War, and in the midst of which the emigrating camps were
obliged to halt until the following spring, when they started for the
western wilds of this great interior country. I said these things had
been directed by the overruling providence of God. The combined force of the unbelieving and the wicked was brought to bear
to expel the Saints, and compel their journey westward to the Rocky
Mountains. It was permitted by Him who overrules all things for the
good of His people; and the trials of the people and the afflictions
of individuals and individual families were eventually lost, as it
were, and buried in the universal good which Providence had provided
for His people as a whole. The school of experience through which the
early leaders and families of Israel had passed for a period of
sixteen years had fitted them for those trying scenes and for the work
which they were destined to perform in these mountains, in grappling
with the difficulties of a new country, of a barren waste, of an
untried region, a region supposed to be utterly uninhabitable. The
great arid belt bordering on the Rocky Mountains, extending for some
hundreds of miles eastward of the Rocky Mountains, and across the
great basin of the American desert, was supposed to be absolutely
unproductive—incapable of producing cereals, vegetables and fruits
necessary to civilization. The school boys of my age will remember to
have looked on their maps and seen all this country marked as the
Great American Desert. It was supposed that a strip bordering on the
Pacific, was composed of fine fertile land, and adapted to European
settlements. But that country on the Pacific, was, at that time, in
the possession of the Mexicans, with a few Catholic missions
established along the coast, where they had raised a few beans and
cabbages and red peppers, and where they had sustained themselves
mostly by raising stock. This was all there was to show for their
presence in that region. And the few trappers who had mingled with the
Indians of this great interior country for twenty years were of the
opinion that it was utterly impossible to raise grain in any part of
this region. Captain James Bridger, the noted hunter and trapper, who
had intermarried and established a trading post among the Shoshones,
met the pioneers on the Big Sandy, and gave it as the opinion of
himself, and of the early trappers who had gone through this country,
that it would be impossible to raise grain here. He told us of the
valley of the Great Salt Lake, and pointed out especially the valley,
which he termed the valley of the Utah outlet—the valley that spread
between the fresh water lake of Utah and the Great Salt Lake—as the
most probable place in all of this great interior country to raise
grain, at the same time supplementing his account of the land with
the opinion that it was impossible to raise grain, and as a clincher
to his opinion offered $1,000 as a premium for the first ear of corn
that should be raised in this valley. But the faith which sustained
the Saints, and which led them, responded through President Brigham
Young to Captain Bridger like this: "Wait a little season and we will
show you."
We have shown to the world what could be done, or, I will say, rather,
the Lord our God—the God of the Latter-day Saints—has shown to us and
to all the world what could be done in this hitherto barren region
when His blessing rested upon it.
The first important movement of the pioneer company on setting foot
upon this ground near City Creek, was to call the camp together, and
bow down under the sun at high noon, and dedicate themselves unto God,
and this land for the habitation of His Saints, imploring His
blessing upon it, that its barrenness might be turned into
fruitfulness, and that the rewards of His people might be sure. And
whithersoever their footsteps were turned, to the north or the south,
to the east or the west, the prayer and faith of an afflicted and
devoted people ascended up to heaven for the God of the land to
sanctify it, and hallow the elements and make the country fruitful.
The art of irrigation was unknown on the North American continent at
that time—at least among European settlers in the United States. There
was no part of the United States which at that time relied upon
artificial irrigation in all the arid regions of America. The system
of irrigation adopted in Utah has measurably been copied by
California, Colorado, Arizona, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana, although
some of the best features of our system of irrigation have been
neglected in these surrounding States and Territories; canal and
irrigation companies have there been allowed to organize and
monopolize the streams and make the farmers tributary to them,
taxpayers for use of the fluid which God sends down from heaven—that
is, they have not united the interest of the farmer, the land owner,
with the canal owners as we have done in Utah, but they have made the
water rather personal property than an attach of the realty,
compelling the farmer to rent or buy water for their lands. Herein
Utah sets an example in this arid region to the rest of the world,
and the future history of this great interior country will award all
due honor to the wise legislation of Utah, and the wise counsels of
her leaders, and deprecate the folly of the surrounding States and
Territories in not following their example in this respect. But the
Lord has blessed the labors of the people of Utah in diverting the
mountain streams over the arid plains, and opening farms, orchards and
vineyards, and building villages, towns and cities, organizing
governments, and establishing a commonwealth. That the early history
of the Latter-day Saints fitted its leaders for governing, for
organizing and controlling society, and molding it for the best
interest of the whole, will be admitted by the impartial historian of
future ages, when the religious bigotry of the hour shall have spent
its fury, and the stupid, blind ignorance of demagogues shall have
been lost and drowned in the common sense of the people. Yet, our
eastern neighbors in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and the Atlantic
States, sanctioned in their inmost hearts the murder of the Prophets,
and the persecution and expulsion of the Saints, though some of them
lifted up their voices against it, but the voices so lifted were "like
angels' visits, few and far between," and powerless to turn the
popular current or stem the tide that flowed, like the waters which
the serpent cast out of his mouth after the apocalyptic woman that
fled from the face of the serpent into the wilderness. The Lord had a
place prepared for His Church in the wilderness, in the Great American
Desert, where she would be preserved from the face of the serpent for
a season.
I well remember those early years, as do many who are here before me
today, though their numbers are fast becoming very visibly less. We
remember the time when the first State government was organized in
these mountains. It was simultaneous with the organization of a State
government on the Pacific coast under the title of the State of Califor nia. Delegates were appointed by the provisional
government of the State of Deseret, to visit Washington and present
their application for admission into the Union at the same Congress at
which California's representatives appeared and knocked for admission.
Both acted in their sovereign capacity in organizing their State
government and adopting their State constitution. It did not need any
special act of Congress extending liberty to them so to do; for in
both instances the people of California and Utah acted in virtue of
their inalienable rights as free men entitled to the enjoyment of free
government, and under the general institutions of our country, that
recognize the right of the people to local self-government. Each State
organized a State government, adopted a State constitution; they were
equally republican in form and liberal in spirit, and made a
simultaneous application to Congress for admission. The answer of the
general government to California was favorable; to that of Deseret
unfavorable; in other words they recognized in the one the rights of
local self-government, admitted their senators and representatives to
Congress, and the State into the Union, on an equal footing with the
original States; while to Deseret they handed back a Territorial form
of government, adopted the Organic Act, and appointed their
territorial officers. Thanks to the advice of our never deviating
friend, General Thomas L. Kane, President Fillmore, who succeeded
General Taylor in the Presidency, nominated President Brigham Young as
the first Governor of Utah. Thankful were we even for this partial
recognition of the rights of the people to local self-government, but
strange to say, that in the organization of our Territorial
government, it seemed good to the Congress of the United States to
make the Governor of Utah an integral part of its local legislature,
empowered to approve its laws or to exercise an unqualified and
absolute veto in all matters of legislation, a feature, so
unrepublican and unusual, that it could scarcely be endured by any
other people for a period of 35 years, except the Latter-day Saints,
and in this instance we are an exception. Two-thirds of the Senate and
two-thirds of the House of Representatives can pass any measure over
the veto of the President of the United States. The same may be said
of all the legislatures in every State in the Union; a two-thirds vote
of the Legislature suffices to pass any measure over the veto of the
governor, and this is the rule obtaining in the territories, as well
as the States, with the exception of Utah and New Mexico.
I only refer to this as an instance of the marked jealousy that has
prevailed toward this people—the unwillingness to concede to them the
common right of local self-government.
Under the administration of Governor Young, his efforts were ever
directed with the Legislative Assembly to enlarge and extend the area
of freedom and the liberty of the voter, and the rights of the common
people, never attempting to exercise the veto power, much less to
enlarge and extend, the executive prerogatives; and under his
administration, laws were enacted to provide for various offices
necessary to administer the affairs of the Territorial government, as
well as those of counties and municipalities, making them all elective
by the people, or by their chosen representatives in Legislative
Assembly united. It seems to have been reserved to one or two
of our late Governors—notably our present one—to labor assiduously,
tenaciously, blindly, and, as we think, foolishly, to abridge the
popular suffrage, the rights of the mass of the people in the
management of their own local affairs, and the election of their own
officers, or for the handling of their own finances; I say it seems to
be left to our late governors to earnestly struggle to enlarge the
executive prerogative. Not content with the veto power reserved in the
Organic Act by Congress to annul any act of the Legislative Assembly
of Utah, nor yet with the second veto vested absolutely in the
Governor by simply withholding his approval of any measure; the
present Governor has sought in various ways to extend and enlarge this
executive prerogative.
I refer to these things only as items of history which we are making
for ourselves, and which our Federal government and its
representatives in Utah are making for themselves, and which the
historian will point to as the evidence of a continual desire for
aggression upon the liberties of the people.
I am well aware that the excuse for all this is the unity of our
people—the fact that they are not so greatly distracted by the efforts
of aspiring demagogues and political satraps—and that their own common
sense teaches them the necessity, under existing circumstances, to
consider well and ponder the paths of their feet, and unite in the
wisest and best measures, and in the choice of reliable honorable men
to fill the various offices within the gift of the people, rather than
divide and admit into power aspiring demagogues. We, as a people, have
adopted the motto, that the office should seek the man, instead of the
man seeking the office, and have invariably administered to the office
seekers this quiet rebuke, a ticket-of-leave to stay at home. The good
sense of the people has led them to seek out honorable and
non-aspiring men and call them to duty, to fill the offices in the
interests of the people, not for plunder and pelf, but for the reward
of a good conscience and the approbation of an honest, discerning and
approving people. And this unity of the people has not been solely a
matter of our own seeking, however desirable it is, but measurably the
result of outward pressure. If left to ourselves, unbelied, unscoffed
at; if treated with any degree of fairness and liberality, and freedom
to enjoy the rights and immunities of citizenship, unmolested,
unpersecuted, I fear that we should soon begin to learn the ways of
the wicked around us, or of the foolish of other countries, and the
heedless, the thoughtless, and the ignorant among us would soon be
following political demagogues. But it seems to be one of the
providences of God, that there should be sufficient opposition from
without—that is, from those who are not of us—to bind us together and
enable us to see our only true interest in seeking to become one. And
that oneness has not been the oneness of blindness, a blind following
of the blind, but has been the result of Seers and Prophets and wise
men and sages and fathers of the people foreseeing the evil and
pointing it out in that way and manner that all have been able to view
and see it for themselves. They have followed with their eyes open the
Seers and Prophets who are not walking in darkness, and the result has
been that we have not fallen into the ditch together, but we have
continued to prosper and go on in the path which heaven has marked out for us, and the enemies of this people, who have resorted
to every measure which their cunning and ingenuity could devise to
hamper them and lessen their liberties—it is these which have fallen
into the ditch, that have been trapped in their own measures, that
have been ensnared with their own snares, and their folly has been
made manifest, and the prediction of the Prophet Isaiah has happened
unto them: The wisdom of their wise men has perished, and the
understanding of their prudent men has been hid. No more in any former
examples than in their last effort—the Edmunds law, so called—which
is the result of the combined efforts and labors of a nation, begotten
by the hireling priests, a conclave that met in Ogden, the
representatives of all the sectarians in Utah. Then a nation groaned,
and "the mountain labored," and brought forth a mouse, the Edmunds
law! Its main object was to be effected through a Commission, chosen
expressly, not to administer that law according to the letter of it,
but chosen with a secret understanding and tacit obligations to
enforce it with the spirit of despotism in which it had been
conceived; and by establishing rules—irresponsible rules—rules of
their own—absolute and appealable to nobody—and enforcing them in
their own way they have succeeded in disfranchising not only actual
polygamists, but all those who have been in any way associated or
connected with polygamist families—not only plural wives, but first
wives, and men and women who long years ago have been freed—to use a
common phrase—from polygamy; all who have from any cause ceased to be
polygamists. All these have been disfranchised—excluded from
political privileges—forbidden to be officeholders, even to be a
fence viewer, or a school director, or a public surveyor, or a
supervisor of streets. Have the men who made this country, who
organized government therein, who established order, preserved peace,
and tamed the savage—who were the mountain police for all this great
interior country for 30 years—have these tamely submitted to these
arbitrary rulings and decisions without protest, and because there was
no power to withstand? I will only say they have done it from the same
inspiration and feeling that has governed them from the beginning in
all their wanderings. They have stooped to conquer! Will they conquer?
Yes, God will conquer, and with Him they will rise and prevail. Let no
one attempt to seize upon this expression as one of treason, of
disloyalty to government, of defiance of the power of this great
country. It is not spoken in that spirit, nor with any such intent;
but it is the outspoken declaration of that faith which underlies the
movements of this people, and which has led them on to victory from
the beginning. You may write it down as a prophecy, but not as a
threat, not as a defiance, not as a treasonable utterance. We
recognize our allegiance to the general government: we recognize that
it is our duty to sustain constitutional law and the institutions of
our common country, and if men in power overstep their legitimate
bounds, and exercise power that is not vested in them under the
constitution, and violate its sacred provisions in their zeal to
trample upon the liberties of the Saints, or hedge up their ways, it
is our duty to bear and forbear, until the Lord says—"'Tis enough,"
and until He shall open the way, in His own wonderful manner, to bring
about a change and our release.
I well recollect the speeches that were uttered in some of the
great cities of the west and of the eastern States, when the whole
people were aroused and urged to bring their influence to bear upon
Congress to pass the Edmunds law. I well remember that numbers of
their most noted orators uttered the declaration that polygamy was the
least part of the evil they warred against in Utah. I have always been
aware of this. Only a few, comparatively speaking, of their leading
orators had the temerity—or perhaps the lack of policy—to give
utterance, in a public manner, to this view of the case. But those who
gave such utterance said that the unity exhibited by the people of
Utah—the united, solid vote of the Latter-day Saints—was far more to
be dreaded than their polygamy. This was recognized and made clearly
manifest by the action of the present Executive of Utah, when he first
introduced as a prerequisite to commissioning Notaries Public, an oath
of his own providing, unlawful in every way, under pain of refusing
their commissions, viz., that they were not polygamists or bigamists,
and had not cohabited with more than one woman in the marriage
relation! And when the Utah Commissioners arrived in Utah and entered
upon their labors, in one of the schemes devised for carrying into
effect the Edmunds law, they adopted the same measure that had been
introduced by His Excellency, Governor Murray, and incorporated the
same provision in their test oath—thrust in the mouths or in the face
of every individual voter, male and female, this test oath, leaving
every libertine in the land, and every lewd woman, every secret
whoremonger and adulterer at liberty to register, vote, and hold
office, provided their liaisons have not been in the marriage
relation! But the honorable men and the honorable women who had
entered into sacred vows with each other, and had sacredly observed
these vows, and were rearing their families to honor and respect their
parents and to be good citizens in society, teaching them to fear God,
and honor the Patriarchs of old, and flee fornication, and look upon
whoredom and adultery as the greatest of all crimes, next to the
shedding of innocent blood—all these fathers and mothers must be
disfranchised! And an attempt made to dishonor them in the eyes of
their sons and daughters! They appealed to their sons and daughters to
rise up in their majesty and throw their fathers and their mothers
overboard, and elect them to power. And when the people nominated Hon.
John T. Caine as their Delegate to Congress, to supply the vacancy
made by the illiberal and unrepublican action of the so-called
Republican party in the expulsion of their Delegate, Hon. George Q.
Cannon, from Congress; the opposing candidate, Judge P. T. Van Zile,
went through this Territory, delivering his political speech, calling
to his aid his retainers, in every place where he could get an
audience, telling the masses of the people: My election means the
continuation of your liberties; the election of my opponent means your
disfranchisement as a whole people, the abolishment of your
Legislative Assembly, the reducing of you to a colony governed,
absolutely, as a conquered race. Suiting the action to the word, those
who sustained him have labored to bring about his prophecies, and they
are still laboring to bring them about. We know full well, that the
devil, as well as the Lord, can utter some truths, and sometimes is
allowed to fulfill his predictions. Wicked men do this as well
as righteous men. But there is one decree that has gone out from days
of old, that whatever may be the result of a few skirmishes here and
there, and now and then, through the generations of men, the great and
last battle shall result in the utter overthrow of his Satanic
Majesty; he will be bound in everlasting chains and thrust into the
bottomless pit, his followers being cast down with him. It is this
assurance underlying the faith of the Saints, that enables them to go
forward, onward and upward, relying upon the arm of Jehovah, and the
ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness in the earth. That those
men who have laid these schemes to abridge our liberties and
immunities as citizens; and forged fetters for our hands and feet,
have not done so in the interests of morality, is made painfully
apparent in the test oath framed by Governor Murray, adopted by the
Commissioners, and sustained—so far as any outward manifestation is
concerned—by Congress and the people of the nation, in that they
continue to uphold this Federal Governor and these Commissioners, and
to sustain them in their rulings and in the results thereof. Had they
been honestly working in the interest of morality, would they merely
have made the effort to exclude those that were in plural marriage,
and embrace in their arms the libertine, the adulterer, the
whoremonger, the fornicator, and every lewd person of every class in
the land outside of the marriage relation? This shows it was the
patriarchal order of marriage that they warred against, and not
against illicit intercourse and the defilement of the sexes and
degeneracy of the race. All these things are held up before high
heaven, for angels to look upon, for future historians to descant
upon, and for the children that may, peradventure, be spared of these
ignoble sires to gaze upon with unutterable disgust. The one-man power
exercised by a stranger appointed to Federal office, and sent among
the people as a Governor; the one-man power that puts forth his ipse
dixit to nullify the acts of a great people through their
representatives in the Legislative Assembly, and to dictate to the
people, or their representatives, what they may do with their taxes,
or what they must not do with them—all these things, I say, will be
referred to by the future historian as very, very black marks upon
their history; and also their blind zeal and efforts—to what? To
prevent the growth, enlargement and extension of the Latter-day Saints
in the land. This is the real object underlying all their efforts. The
Latter-day Saints do not imitate the examples of the Eastern cities
and the old commonwealths of the Atlantic seaboard in destroying their
offspring. They do not patronize the vendor of noxious, poisonous,
destructive medicines to procure abortion, infanticide, child murder,
and other wicked devices, whereby to check the multiplication of their
species, in order to facilitate the gratification of fleshly lust. We
are not disposed to imitate these examples, nor to drink in the
pernicious doctrine once uttered in Plymouth Church by the noted Henry
Ward Beecher—that it was a positive evil to increase families in the
land beyond a limited extent, and the ability of the parents to
properly educate and maintain them, sustaining the idea of small
families; in effect, justifying the mothers—the unnatural mothers—of
New England, and their partners who sanction their efforts in
destroying their own offspring, and in prevent ing the
fecundity of the race. Fancy such a doctrine justified by the noted
orator of the nineteenth century, and reechoed by the smaller fry
throughout the country! The Latter-day Saints are taught to reverence
the words of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, concerning the
multiplication of their species, and are called as His children to
multiply and replenish the earth. If the traveler who visits Utah,
will deign to visit our congregations, our schools and our Improvement
Associations, he can view hosts of children growing up on every hand,
all of whom are taught to read and write, and in the common branches
of an English education beyond that which is found to exist in any
other part of the land under similar circumstances. But
notwithstanding all this, they say secretly among themselves, and in
the national and state councils: "This will never do. A people
multiplying and increasing like this will overrun the land." They
say, as did Pharaoh of old, "We must do something to stop this
increase." Pharaoh devised means of secretly checking it, by charging
his midwives, and making a decree, that every male child born in
Israel should be put to death. We read that when Moses was born and
his mother found him a goodly child she disregarded the decree of the
king, and God overruled in her favor, in pursuance of her faith, and
protected her movements, and Moses was spared and brought into the
king's house, and unwittingly educated under his tuition to become the
future deliverer of Israel, and the lawgiver of nations. History but
repeats itself. The efforts of the wicked to stop the growth and
enlargement of the Latter-day Saints will as signally fail, and the
failure will be on as natural principles as it was anciently in the
days of Moses. For the Lord has decreed it. He has decreed that Zion
shall prosper, and that in the latter days righteousness and truth
shall prevail. Blessed are all they that will listen to truth and walk
righteously, and woe! be unto those who fight against Zion. For the
time cometh saith the Lord of Hosts, when all they that fight against
Zion shall be as a dream of a night vision. "It shall even be as when
an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and
his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he
drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath
appetite: so shall the multitude of all the nations be, that fight
against Zion." This work is not of man but of God, who has set His
hand the second time to bring again Zion. And He has said: "Gather my
saints unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice."
His arm is stretched out to accomplish the purposes which He has
predicted by His Prophets from the beginning of the world until the
present time, and it will not be turned back until it has accomplished
all things.
May the grace of God be and abide with us individually and
collectively: may it assist us to remember these things; may we not
forget the high calling whereunto we are called; may we abide in the
truth; may we stand steadfast to our work; may we go forward in our
labors, yielding not unto the tempter; for if we are faithful our
triumph is sure and our reward cometh not from beneath, but from
above, through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.