No, let their enemies say what they will, the Mormon settlements are each of them to-day a refutation of the libel that the Mormons are not sincere in their antipathy to strong drink and tobacco. That individual Mormons drink and smoke proves nothing, except that they do it. For the great majority of the Mormons, they are strictly sober. I know it to my great inconvenience. Is it possible then that the American people, so generous in their impulses, so large-hearted in action, have been misled as to the true character of the Mormon "problem"? At first sight this may seem impossible. A whole people, it will be said, cannot have been misled. But I think a general misapprehension is quite within the possibilities. Whence have the public derived their opinions about Mormonism? From anti-Mormons only. I have ransacked the literature of the subject, and yet I really could not tell any one where to go for an impartial book about Mormonism later in date than Burton's "City of the Saints," published in 1862. Burton, it is well known, wrote as a man of wide travel and liberal education--catholic, therefore, on all matters religious, and generous in his views of ethical and social obliquities, sympathetic, consistent, and judicial. It is no wonder, then, that Mormons remember the distinguished traveller, in spite of his candour, with the utmost kindness. But put Burton on one side, and I think I can defy any one to name another book about the Mormons worthy of honest respect. From that truly awful book, "The History of the Saints," published by one Bennett (even an anti-Mormon has styled him "the greatest rascal that ever came to the West") in 1842, down to Stenhouse's in 1873, there is not, to my knowledge, a single Gentile work before the public that is not utterly unreliable from its distortion of facts. Yet it is from these books--for there are no others--that the American public has acquired nearly all its ideas about the people of Utah. The Mormons themselves are most foolishly negligent of the power of the press, and of the immense value in forming public opinion of a free use of type. They affect to be indifferent to the clamour of the world, but when this clamour leads to legislative action against them, they turn round petulantly with the complaint that there is a universal conspiracy against them. It does not seem to occur to them that their misfortunes are partly due to their own neglect of the very weapons which their adversaries have used so diligently, so unscrupulously, and so successfully.