When we turn from the simple legal question, and the still more simple military one, to the moral point involved in the forcible suppression of plural marriage in one State by the might of all the others, we find the consideration of the matter confused by the apparent analogy between the so-called crusade against slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy. There is no real resemblance between the cases. In the strictest sense there was no more a crusade against slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the part of a man who strikes one that bit him. The purest republicans have never pretended that the abolition of slavery was the justification of the war. The South rose in rebellion, and in rising gave New England an opportunity for the destruction in America of an institution at variance with the republican form of government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democracy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not to see that it is the most leveling of all social institutions--Mormonism the most democratic of religions. A rich man in New York leaves his two or three sons a large property, and founds a family; a rich Mormon leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable fraction of his money, and each son must trudge out into the world, and toil for himself. Brigham‘s sons--those of them who are not gratuitously employed in hard service for the church in foreign parts--are cattle-drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was the only poorly-clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and consequently all the children, are equal before the law, is a powerful engine of democracy. The general moral question of whether Mormonism is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter-day Saints differ in certain social customs from other Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not for a traveling observer of English-speaking countries as they are. Mormonism comes under my observation as the religious and social system of the most successful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this point of view it would be an immediate advantage to the world that they should be driven out once more into the wilderness, again to found an England in Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Red River. It may be an immediate gain to civilization, but America herself was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance to all; and there are still to be found Americans who think it would be the severest blow that has been dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution at the cannon‘s mouth.