MORMON CRIMINALITY.
The abomination of Mormon polyg-amy is a thorn in the side of Ameri-can respectability, which seems to baffle all efforts to remove it. Under the genius of our government, vouch-safing to every man the right to secu-rity in his religious belief the crime is mantled and the indecency fostered. A jesuitical priesthood controls the de-votion of a multitude of poor deluded votaries, and against the tide of na-tional protest, in flagrant violation of civilization's tenets and the laws of the land, the hierarchy flaunts its crime-stained doctrine before the world, and claims it as a right, under proud America's humane institutions of civil and religious liberty.
Mormon polygamy is an institution claimed, by its upholders, to be sanct-ioned by God, and has been permitted to exist in our country unpunished for more than half a century. The flight of the Mormons from Nauvoo to Salt Lake years ago, was likened by some at the time to the hegira of Mehamet from Mecca to Medina in the sixth century, and the grandeur of their career since that period makes the parallel not altogether unhistoric. It has rapidly increased in numbers. It has defied religion, morality and law. It has battened upon the blood of innocent American citizens and for years succeeded marvelously in hiding one of the darkest calenders of crime that ever tarnished the name of hu-manity. It has defied the government and permitted to take part in its councils.
All the while, however, its presence was a mockery and a lie upon our civil and religious institutions. That which elsewhere has been denounced and punished as a crime, has lived and flourished in Utah in all the rip-ening elements of a permanent insti-tution.
The government through successive administrations has failed to meet the exegency of Mormonism. One faint glimmer of hope was hailed with applause when Hawkins was con-victed of bigamy and condemned to the full extent of the law in 1871, and we took courage in the prospect that such proceedings would follow each other until this fungus should be removed from our form of Western civilization.
But in this we counted without our host. To-day the Courts of justice are wrestling with a bigamous offender, but Mormon juries and witnesses will not convict a Mormon criminal, and so they continue to go unpunished and to grow louder in the proclamations of their infamous creed.
So long as that country is under the control of Mormon suffrages and Mormon influences, it is useless to talk of eradicating the blotch by civil proceedure; but it does seem as though its suppression by any power necessary to the purpose would be not only justifiable but just, and the might of this nation is sufficient, so far as power is concerned, to compel the polyagamists to give up their abomination, or dump them into the Great Salt Lake in a body. It is a shame to defend them on grounds of religion. As well defend the can-nabal, or the savage Indian here at home, whose religion it was to shoot down the hapless "doctor" of their tribe who failed to cure a patient.
Slavery was not more foreign to the spirit of our institutions and laws than is the system of polygamy at Salt Lake, yet slavery was swept away, and the other should be, by the same means, if necessary.
