“I yearn for two or three adult doughnuts and one of those thick, dappled
slabs of gingerbread, or slat of pie with gooseberries in it. I presume
that I could write a scathing editorial on the abuses of our currency yet,
but I am not so much in the scathe business as I used to be.
“I wish you would state, if you will, through some great metropolitan
journal, that my views in relation to the silver coinage and the currency
question have undergone a radical change, and that any plan whatever, by
which to make the American dollar less skittish, will meet with my hearty
approval.
“If I have done anything at all through my paper to injure or repress the
flow of our currency, and I fear I have, I now take this occasion to
cheerfully regret it.”
He then wrung my hand and passed from my sight.
Polygamy as a Religious Duty.
During the past few years in the history of our republic, we have had
leprosy, yellow fever and the dude, and it seemed as though each one would
wreck the whole national fabric at one time. National and international
troubles of one kind and another have gradually risen, been met and
mastered, but the great national abscess known as the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints still obstinately refuses to come to a head.
I may be a radical monogamist and a rash enthusiast upon this matter, but
I still adhere to my original motto, one country, one flag and one wife at
a time. Matrimony is a good thing, but it can be overdone. We can excuse
the man who becomes a collection of rare coins, stamps, or autographs, but
he who wears out his young life making a collection of wives, should be
looked upon with suspicion.
After all, however, this matter has always been, and still is, treated
with too much levity. It seems funny to us, at a distance of 1,600 miles,
that a thick-necked patriarch in the valley of the Jordan should be sealed
to thirteen or fourteen low-browed, half human females, and that the whole
mass of humanity should live and multiply under one roof.
Those who see the wealthy polygamists of Salt Lake City, do not know much
of the horrors of trying to make polygamy and poverty harmonize in the
rural districts. In the former case, each wife has a separate residence or
suite of rooms, perhaps; but in the latter is the aggregation of vice and
depravity, doubly horrible because, instead of the secluded character
which wickedness generally assumes, here it is the common heritage of the
young and at once fails to shock or horrify.
Under the All-seeing eye, and the Bee Hive, and the motto, “Holiness to
the Lord,” with a bogus Bible and a red-nosed prophet, who couldn't earn
$13. per month pounding sand, this so called church hanging on to the
horns of the altar, as it were, defies the statutes, and while in open
rebellion against the laws of God and man, refers to the constitution of
the United States as protecting it in its “religious belief.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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