Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or the shining levels of the Salt Lake had been reached, that mayor--himself a Gentile, and one renowned for his dealings with the Mormons--told me that the great question of the existence of the power within the power was being gradually solved by the ballot and by education. All the beauty of the valley could not make me forget it. And the valley is very fair. Bench after bench of land, flat as a table against the flanks of the ringing hills, marks where the Salt Lake rested for awhile in its collapse from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles long and thirty broad. There are the makings of a very fine creed about Mormonism. To begin with, the Church is rather more absolute than that of Rome. Drop the polygamy plank in the platform, but on the other hand deal lightly with certain forms of excess; keep the quality of the recruit down to the low mental level, and see that the best of all the agricultural science available is in the hands of the elders, and there you have a first-class engine for pioneer work. The tawdry mysticism and the borrowing from Freemasonry serve the low caste Swede and Dane, the Welshman and the Cornish cotter, just as well as a highly organized heaven. Then I went about the streets and peeped into people's front windows, and the decorations upon the tables were after the manner of the year 1850. Main Street was full of country folk from the desert, come in to trade with the Zion Mercantile Co-operative Institute. The Church, I fancy, looks after the finances of this thing, and it consequently pays good dividends. The faces of the women were not lovely. In-deed, but for the certainty that ugly persons are just as irrational in the matter of undivided love as the beautiful, it seems that polygamy was a blessed institution for the women, and that only the dread threats of the spiritual power could drive the hulking, board-faced men into it. The women wore hideous garments, and the men appeared to be tied up with strings. They would market all that afternoon, and on Sunday go to the praying-place. I tried to talk to a few of them, but they spoke strange tongues, and stared and behaved like cows. Yet one woman, and not an altogether ugly one, confided to me that she hated the idea of Salt Lake City being turned into a show-place for the amusement of the Gentiles. “If we 'have our own institutions, that ain't no reason why people should come 'ere and stare at us, his it?” The dropped “h” betrayed her. “And when did you leave England?” I said. “Summer of '84. I am Dorset,” she said. “The Mormon agent was very good to us, and we was very poor. Now we're better off--my father, an' mother, an' me.” “Then you like the State?” She misunderstood at first. “Oh, I ain't livin' in the state of polygamy. Not me, yet. I ain't married. I like where I am. I've got things o' my own--and some land.” “But I suppose you will--”