Gradually, nevertheless, the necessities of the people induced a modification of this system of non-intercourse. The Gentile merchants, who were present with great wagon-trains containing all those articles indispensable to the comfort of life, of which the Mormons stood so much in need, refused to open a single box or bale until they could hire storehouses. The permission was at length accorded, and immediately the absolute external reserve of the people began to wear away. Both sexes thronged to the stores, eager to supply themselves with groceries and garments; but there they experienced a wholesome rebuff, for which some of them were not entirely unprepared. The merchants refused to receive the paper of the Deseret Currency Association with which the Territory was flooded; and its notes were depreciated instantly by more than fifty per cent. Many of the people were driven to barter cattle and farm-produce for the articles they needed; and for the first time since the establishment of the Church in Utah an audible murmur arose among its adherents against its exactions. The sight of their neglected farms was also calculated to bring the poorer agriculturists to sober reflection. They perceived that the army, which they had been taught to believe would commit every conceivable outrage, was, on the contrary, demeaning itself with extreme forbearance and even kindness toward them, and was supplying an ampler market for the sale of their produce than they had enjoyed since the years when the overland emigration to California culminated. Nevertheless, their regrets, if entertained at all, found no public and concerted utterance. The authority of the Church exacted a sullen demeanor toward all Gentiles. The 24th of July, the great Mormon anniversary, was suffered to pass without celebration; but its recurrence must have suggested anxious thoughts and bitter recollections to a great part of the population. When they remembered their enthusiastic declaration of independence only one year before, the warlike demonstrations which followed it, the prophecies of Young that the Lord would smite the army as he smote the hosts of Sennacherib, the fever of hate and apprehension into which they had been worked, and contrasted that period of excitement with their present condition, they must, indeed, have found abundant material for meditation. By the emigration southward they had lost at least four months of the most valuable time of the year. Their families had been subjected to every variety of exposure and hardship. Their ready money had been extorted from them by the Currency Association, or consumed in the expenses of transporting their movables to Lake Utah. And more than all, the fields had so suffered by their absence, that the crops were diminished to at least one-half the yield of an ordinary year. To a community the mass of which lives from hand to mouth, this was a most serious loss.