NO. FORTY-FIVE.
Matrimonial advices from Utah state that Mr. Brig-ham Young has just taken a forty-fifth wife: the ac-tual number of his family not being increased, as No. 23 died the other day. This looks very little like abandoning polygamy; and it is arithmetically de-monstrable that, if a Mormon magnate is to have half a hundred wives, the “Gentile” inhabitants must, many of them, be forced to celibacy: a fate which the gen-tle reader, if he were also a Gentile and living at Salt Lake, might possibly regard as unjust, if not intoler-able. Putting moral considerations out of the ques-tion, it is evident that, as a mere matter of economical arrangement, while every man should have one wife, he is entitled to no more than one; and when somebody gets forty-five, somebody else must go without any. Whether the effect of this deprivation in Utah it to exacerbate the bachelor Gentiles, and so render them difficult to get along with, we do not know; but if the accounts which reach us from that quarter are to be credited, there is altogether more assassination going on in these parts than we should consider agreeable. These little events, our correspondent writes to us, are "of com-mon occurrence;" which must be unpleasant to those who do not receive the gospel of the late Smith. We are certainly for the largest toleration; and, as a gen-eral rule, we would have nobody persecuted for con-science' sake; but we would have a man who feels it to be a religious duty to shoot us, mildly restrained. "We wonder that Mr. Young, who is so much under the influence of lovely woman, does not grow more amiable; but we won-der still more, being a man of sense and in many re-spects of good judgment, that he does not at once abolish all the nonsense and wickedness of polygamy. It is only a question of time. The practice is doomed, sooner or later, to disappear; it is precisely what it has been so aptly termed, "a relic of barbarism;" all the sophistry in the world can make it nothing else; and, as it is not absolutely a part of the Mormon faith, but is only tolerated by that faith, and as it is totally incompatible with the best forms of civilization, we do not understand why Mr. Brigham Young does not set a good example to his neighbors by putting away forty-four of his wives, and by cleaving faithfully to the forty-fifth. The ceremony would be impressive, and furnish the subject for a grand historical picture, with twenty-two repudiated ladies upon one side, an equal number upon the other, and No. Forty-five standing side by side with the Governor in the center! The day which witnessed such a spectacle as this would be the brightest in the history of Utah! Then and then only would there begin to be something like social peace in that beautiful territory; and until then the State re-ligion, if we may call it so, will be a persecuting, in-tolerant, murdering religion, such as nobody has a right to set up and maintain in any State or Territory subject to the Constitution of the United States. As for the religion, such as it is, it must take its chances; if there be anything good in it, that good will survive; and whatever is bad ought not to survive another day. It is worse than folly to talk about conscience when con-science impels to crime or to oppression. What respect are we bound to have for the conscience which pricks on its possessor to murder, and to murder in its most shameful shape? Any rascal can plead a revelation. Any homicide can justify himself by the Divine com-mand. There is but one form of religion that is not to be tolerated in all America; and it is that which sets fanaticism above the laws, and makes private revenge a pious duty. It is not necessary to suppose the Mor-mons to be maliciously wicked, or to love bloodshed for its own sake; the mischief is done when they find in their faith an excuse for acts which the laws of all civilized nations forbid. Who knows what may come next? Who knows what altars of hideous sacrifice may be erected or what victims an unreasoning en-thusiasm may call for?
Of the final result, we have no doubt. We have never seen a good defense of Polygamy—never any in fact, which was not disgraceful sophistry; and social order and happiness are so entirely dependent upon the purity of the domestic relations, that while any man in Utah has forty-five wives, and much more—while several men have that or a smaller number—we shall expect other forms of barbarism, and that oppression of the Gentiles of which all unprejudiced observers complain. If Mr. Brigham Young would but come to his senses, extirpate polygamy from his creed, be content with No. 45, and behave like a civilized citizen, we do not know a man in the country who is in a position to do more good. Should he remain incorrigible, the authority of the United States may not always be a myth, even in Utah.
