A WOMAN'S INDIGNATION TOWARD THE MORMONS.
If bigamous John Smith, with the old wife that he was tired of and the new one that be was fond of, were to dare to appear in one of these seats, how soon he would be cast into the outer darkness of a well-barred jail, minus the consolation of his latest spouse. But the man who personifies the lowest tyranny on earth—who seeks license under the cloak of religion und in the name of the Lord—he is "the honor-able delegate from Utah," and in unmolested fatness serenely surveys the situation, and does his share of making laws for decent people in a Representative's chair, To be a Mormon in this age a man must be a knave or a fool. Neither has any right in the Congress of the United States. Perhaps the greatest organiz-ing mind that this country has ever produced is that of Brigham Young. In comprehensive will and grappling force, his administrative talent is tremendous. It has never been sur-passed by any ruler on earth, and can only be measured by his own passion for power, his monstrous impostures and selfishness. If you doubt these, study the life of the man, his words and deeds. No greater foe to the truth and to true progress lives. Give him his way, and he would drag the entire race back to primeval ignorance; but Brigham would be its prophet and its king. Every woman who breathes owes a vow of eternal hatred to such a man, for the words that be utters to her be-cause she is a woman, for the ignominy to which he would doom her, for the seal of beastly servitude which he has stamped upon the lives of twenty women who are called by his name.
A few weeks since there appeared at the breakfast table of the House, in Washing-ton, a delicate, slender, pallid woman, dressed in black. Her features were fine and feminine, her eyes dark and sad; she was of a nervous, sensitive temperament, and she bore the un-mistakable marks of fragile health and the in-effaceable traces of mental suffering. A lady sitting near marked this pale woman in black, amid the gay throngs around her, and inquired who she was, to learn that she was the nine-teenth wife of Brigham Young, come to tell her story beneath the very shadow of that Capitol, whose manly denizens are never weary of pro-claiming that under that vaunted Constitution "all men are born free and equal."
The lady, before she looked upon the stran-ger, had not been free from a feeling of preju-dice that a woman who had lived through such a late could ever lift her head to tell her story in public. But as she gazed upon the sister woman before her, she let all such prejudice go. If George Q. Cannon, a Mormon Bishop, the owner of four wives, the representative of such a system, could sit in Congress unchal-lenged, might not its victim, who had broken her chain, tell the story of its crushing wrong, if there was but one to listen?
Any discouraging person, beholding her, would say that by nature she was sensitive, re-fined, and delicate in more than a common de-gree, and that purity of feeling and capacity for suffering looked forth together from her countenance. The lady who looked upon her took occasion to say this much of one to whom she had never spoken, but to whom her heart went out in profoundest pity. A few days later there came back to her these words, written by one of "Mrs. Young's" companions:
"Mrs. Young lectured in Brooklyn last even-ing, in Hansen Place M. E. Church, to a fine audience of good people. The day had been one of unusual gloom and loneliness to her. As she was coming out of the church a reporter of the - handed your letter to her. As she is too much exhausted to write, I drop you a line to thank you for your unsolicited kindness. Allow me to assure you that you have helped a suffering, heart-broken woman, who has conse-crated herself to the work of exposing the most vile and monstrous religious fraud that ever God tolerated. She has a just quarrel with the religion that has robbed her of all happiness in this world. If you had only spoken to her you know not how dear and loving a friend you would have made. May God in Heaven bless you, and be assured that you ate remembered in one earnest prayer each day."
A day or two later came the following from Ann Eliza Webb herself:
* * * "You have assisted one who needed it, one who will never forget your kindness, and who will ever remember you in her pray-ers. I regret that you did not hear my story, that you might know more fully what I have endured, and what, many other women are suf-fering, for I feel that you would be moved in earnest sympathy for the victims of the most degrading and heart-breaking system ever de-vised by man. You would know then that it is not for money alone that I am laboring to be heard. That you may receive your reward from a higher source is the prayer of your grateful friend."
These heartfelt words, written without a thought of their ever being seen but by the eyes of one I recommend in the consideration of the good men of the Committee of Elections, who are now considering the charges of polyg-amy made against George Q. Cannon, the de-fender and representative of the accursed sys-tem which is crushing out for women, amid all the ruin that sin has wrought and all the an-guish the fall has brought to her, her one pure, sufficing and compensating joy—the love, the honor and the undivided selfhood of the man whose name she bears and whose wife she is.—[Mary C. Ames.
