Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the MormonsRobinson, Phil
General
Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons
Robinson, Phil
Latter Day Saint churches; Utah -- Description and travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
are hardly worth repeating. Nor does it appear to me to be of any force
to begin raking to-day into the old suspicions as to what Mormons dead
and gone used to do.
What is polygamy like to-day? That is the question. Polygamy to-day,
then, has settled down into the most matter-of-fact system that is
possible for such exceptional domestic arrangements. In the first
place, it is not compulsory, and some of the leading saints are
monogamous. About one-fourth of married Mormons are polygamous, and of
these something less than three per cent are under forty years of age.
The bill of 1862 making polygamy penal effected little or no difference
in the annual average of plural marriages, but since 1877 there has
been a very sensible decrease.
These facts, then, seem to prove first that polygamy, though accepted
as a doctrine of the Church, is not generally acted upon--and why?
For the best of reasons. Either that the men cannot afford to keep
up more than one establishment, or that they are too happy with one
wife to care to marry a second, or that the first wife refuses to
allow any increase of the household--all of which reasons show that
polygamy is controlled by prudential and domestic considerations, and
is not the indiscriminate "debauchery" that so many of the public
believe it to be. It is also evident that the younger Mormons are not
so active in marrying as the elder men were at their age, for ten
years ago the proportion of polygamous Mormons under forty years of
age was much greater, which may mean that the inaction of Congress was
gradually working towards the end which the action of '62 thwarted.
By legislating against polygamy, plural marriages increased--1863
to 1866 being as busy years in the Endowment House as any that ever
preceded them--while by letting polygamy severely alone they have been
decreasing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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