The Woman's Cause in Utah.
The Corinne (Utah) Journal thinks that women in that Territory are strangely indif-ferent to their privileges and duties. Allud-ing to an address recently delivered in Co-rinne by Mrs. Pitts Stevens, of San Francis-co, that paper says:
The most interesting point Mrs. Stevens made was in reference to the giving of the ballot to woman in Utah by Brigham Young's Legislature. She thought it would prove the "first gun on Sumter" to polygamy. We have thought so, too, or at least hoped so, but after watching the use the women of Utah have made of their new found political power for two years, our hopes are not as strong as they were. Men are nearly at their wits' end with regard to the woman question in view of woman's action in Utah. We are told that we shall introduce a moral element into politics with woman. Are the established relations of the sexes in Utah indicative of high and pure morals? where polygamy, the worst form of woman slavery, is not only en-joyed as a religious duty, but where decency is still further outraged by the toleration of incest? where men change wives or take new ones as often as they tire of those they have, and are true to nothing but their own selfish interests? where men past seventy marry girls of fifteen, and where women are fed on the shucks and husks of superstition instead of love? Yet this is what the women of Utah sustain in the exercise of their political power. Witness 25,000 of them petitioning Congress for the abrogation of the anti-po-lygamy law. Witness their flocking to the polls en mass to vote for their own enslave-ment, mental, spiritual, and physical. Good men are more disheartened in their efforts to Americanize Utah by this perverse action of the Utah women than by all the other difficulties of the case combined. Men have always been forced to the bullet at last in the assertion of their rights. Many have long been of the opinion that it was the only solution of the Mormon imbroglio. Some have been led to hope, however, that the moral element to be introduced in politics by women would do away with the use of the barbarous bullet altogether. But the re-sult, so far, in Utah, is discouraging. And here is a place for Mrs. Stanton and the rest to begin the conquest of the country. Let them retrieve the reputation of their sex in Utah, and through that sex. They have got all they ask, yes, more, for a man born abroad must live in the country five years before he can vote, while the polygamists of Utah have decided, albeit despite the laws of the United States, that a foreign-born woman has only to marry or be married to a saint to entitle her to vote at once on landing. Mrs. Stevens' idea of having Miss Anthony settle in Utah and run for Congress is a capital one. Let her come and bring her disciples and marshal a majority of the women of Utah to the polls and vote them against polygamy and incest, enjoined in the name of religion and submit-ted to with the tameness of sheep, and she will have done something to fix the attention of men. She will have forced men to ac-knowledge the justice of woman's claims to superior moral stamina, or intellectual acu-men, or true instinct, or whatever it may be, and the efficacy of this occult power for the correction of the political ills by which we suffer. If they can persuade their sisters in Utah to throw off the shackles which "man-made revelations'' have fastened upon their limbs and minds, they will have little trouble elsewhere.
