The women have complicated the problem by multiplying instances of eccentric "affection." But with it all they persist in believing that they have retained a most exalted estimate of womanly honour. The men, again, have inextricably entangled all recognized ideas of matrimonial responsibilities. Yet they have not lost any of the manliness which characterizes the pioneers of the West. Their social anomalies are deplorable, but they are not desperate. Education and the influx of outsiders must infallibly do their work, and any attempt to rob these men and women of the fruits of their astonishing industry and of the peaceful enjoyment of the soil which they have conquered for the United States from the most warlike tribes among the Indians, and from the most malignant type of desert, is not only not statesmanship, but it is not humanity. Are the women of Utah happy? No; not in the monogamous acceptation of the word "happy." In polygamy the highest happiness of woman is contentment. But on the other hand her greatest unhappiness is only discontent. She has not the opportunity on the one hand of rising to the raptures of perfect love. On the other, she is spared the bitter, killing anguish of "jealousy" and of infidelity. But contentment is not happiness. It is its negative, and often has its source in mere resignation to sorrow. It is the lame sister of happiness, the deaf-mute in the family of joy. It lives neither in the background nor foreground of enjoyment, but always in the middle distance. Tender in all things, it never becomes real happiness by concentration; having to fill no deep heart-pools, it trickles over vast surfaces. It goes through life smiling but seldom laughing. Now, in many philosophies we are taught that this same contentment is the perfect form of happiness. But humanity is always at war with philosophy. And I for one will never believe that perpetual placidity is the highest experience of natures which are capable of suffering the raptures of joy and of grief. I had rather live humanly, travelling alternately over sunlit hills and gloomy valleys, than exist philosophically on the level prairies of monotonous contentment. Holding, then, the opinion that it is a nobler life to have sounded the deeps and measured the heights of human emotions than to have floated in shallows continually, I contend that polygamy is wrong in itself and a cardinal crime against the possibilities of a woman's heart. A plural wife can never know the utmost happiness possible for a woman. They confess this. And by this confession the practice stands damned.