After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occupants of the country which now forms the Territories of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and were thus annexed to the United States without being in the least degree consulted. It is true that they might be said to have occupied the country as American citizens, and so to have carried American sovereignty with them into the wilderness; but this, again, is a European, not an American theory. American citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or an organized Territory; and though the Mormons may be said to have accepted their position as citizens of the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the understanding that it should continue a Mormon country, where Gentiles should at the most be barely tolerated. We need not go further into the mazes of public law, or of _ex post facto_ American enactments. The Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law is against them; but say that while it is claimed that Boston and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is Boston and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain a Territory, although they admitted the less populous Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as States. If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, there can be no doubt upon the points of law, there can be as little upon the military question. Of the fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert that we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated, and 1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt Lake City. This not only settles the military question, but is meant to do so. When men lay four miles of railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for a whole year, when a government bribes high enough to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is something more than commerce or settlement in the wind. The Pacific Railroad is not merely meant to be the shortest line from New York to San Francisco; it is meant to put down Mormonism. If the Federal government decides to attack these peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or Mexico is their goal, and in the Marquesas or in Sonora they may, perhaps, for a few years at least, be let alone, again to prove the forerunners of English civilization--planters of Saxon institutions and the English tongue; once more to perform their mission, as they performed it in Missouri and in Utah.