Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical SketchesMcCarthy, Justin
History
Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches
McCarthy, Justin
Biography
I well remember that when I lived in Liverpool, some ten or a dozen
years ago, the Mormon propaganda, very active there, always kept the
polygamy institution modestly in the background. Proselytes were courted
and won by descriptions of a new Happy Valley, of a City of the Blest,
where eternal summer shone, where the fruits were always ripe, where the
earth smiled with a perpetual harvest, where labor and reward were
plenty for all, and where the outworn toilers of Western Europe could
renew their youth like the eagles. I remember, too, the remarkable case
of a Liverpool family having a large business establishment in the most
fashionable street of the great town, who were actually beguiled into
selling off all their goods and property and migrating, parents, sons,
and daughters, to the land of promise beyond the American wilderness,
and how, before people had ceased to wonder at their folly, they all
came back, humiliated, disgusted, cured. They had money and something
like education, and they were a whole family, and so they were able,
when they found themselves deceived, to effect a rapid retreat at the
cost of nothing worse than disappointment and pecuniary loss. But for
the poor, pretty serving-lass from Lancashire I do not know that there
is much hope. Poverty and timidity and superstitious weakness will help
to lock the Mormon chains around her. Perhaps she will get used to the
place in time. Ought one to wish that she may--or rather to echo her own
prayer, and petition that she may find an early grave? The graveyards
are densely planted with tombs here in this sacred city of Mormonism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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