NEW SOLUTION OF THE MORMON QUESTION.—How-ever well fitted the "State of Deseret" may be for the polygamous delusion of its inhabitants, they can scarcely ever expect to make it the home of a perma-nent and thriving population. We condense some facts on the subject from a recent editorial in the Evening Journal.
The Salt Lake Valley is but a cluster of oases in a desert. The surveying engineers of the United States Army, have reported that there are but four hundred square miles of arable land in all the Basin. This is in separate tracts, with intervals of deserts, and confined to the streams of water that descend from the moun-tains. To be cultivated, the soil of Utah has to be sub-jected to artificial irrigation.
Whatever the courage and industry of its inhabi-tants the recurrence of Famine, at longer or shorter intervals, seems inevitable. The wide deserts on both sides cut them off from interchange of products with their distant neighbors. If they would, they cannot thus convert their iron, wool, cloth, leather, and crock-ery, into wheat and flour. The immense distances of the transport from California, Oregon, and Wisconsin pre-clude the idea of carrying food to the Mormons. It would be cheaper to move the Mormons to the food.
"But an evil, extraordinary and superadded to those which are chronic and constitutional with Utah, now presses the Mormons sharply, and threatens a speedy end to their civil existence, as well as a solution of all the religio-political questions which their organization has been projecting these three years past into Federal discussion. Countless swarms of grasshoppers are busy devouring the vegetation of Utah. They have whol-ly ate up the wheat—save scattered patches which have been preserved by the labor of men, women and chil-dren, organized into relievieg squads, who with wil-low brushes have painfully swept the insects into run-ning water, where open bags caught them. These were emptied into trenches and buried up. On the 1st of June the winter grain crop of Utah was represented to be lost. On the fields devastated by the grasshop-pers, the courageous Mormons were plowing and har-rowing, in preparation for the planting of potatoes and corn. Are they not planting food for the grasshoppers?
"Sixty thousand Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley may experience hunger this winter. If they do, and if their faith be not stronger than the love of life, Utah is doomed to a steady depopulation, and Mor-monism is broken and lost."
