The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, October 1883Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Philosophy
The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, October 1883
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
On Sunday, the ninth day of September, the steamship “Nevada” landed
682 Mormons at New York, being the fourth company that has been brought
over this year. H. H. Evans, the secretary, said that there were in
the company 269 British, 106 Swiss and Germans, 284 Scandinavians, and
23 returning missionaries. “Every emigrant,” he added, “paid his or
her passage over. No aid is afforded them by the Mormon Church. The
majority have a little money with them, enough to establish themselves
in America. They will locate in sixteen towns in Utah. All we do is
to protect them while traveling from Liverpool to Utah. Some of these
immigrants have been years laying up money to pay their passage to this
country.” One of the Mormon immigrants did not go through to Utah. Her
name is Regina Andersen. She is a Swedish woman, spinster, thirty-five
years of age, and is afflicted with blindness. Her brother Leander and
her sister Anna, who live in Philadelphia, had heard of her intention
to go to Utah and were at Castle Garden to intercept her before the
“Nevada” arrived. They insisted upon talking with their blind sister,
and soon succeeded in persuading her to abandon the Mormon proselytes
and prepare to go with her relatives to Philadelphia. The Mormon
missionaries were strongly opposed to the woman leaving the party,
but the matter was brought before Superintendent Jackson, and the
woman was permitted to go to Philadelphia with her brother. She had
prepaid her passage to Salt Lake and did not receive her money back. In
conversation with a reporter the woman appeared not to know anything
about the peculiar institution of the Mormon Church—polygamy. Congress
could quite as consistently, and with better results to the country,
enact a law to prevent this kind of emigration, than the one they have
leveled against the Chinese. Why not meet Mormonism at New York harbor
and prevent this infamous traffic in human lives?
* * * * *
The Rev. Henry A. Powell, in his Congregational church in Williamsburg,
on a Sunday in September discussed “The sorrows of the Free Thinkers
as revealed at their recent convention,” from this suggestive text:
“The show of their countenances doth witness against them.” He stated
that over their platform were hung the pictures of Thomas Paine, R.
G. Ingersoll, and D. M. Bennett—Paine author of a book against the
Bible—Ingersoll, dispenser of blasphemy—Bennett, who not long since
served a term in the penitentiary for sending foul literature through
the mails. “How much better than such visionary wanderings is the old
story of a living Father in heaven, of a Savior who suffered on the
cross, and angel visitants to lead us from the life mortal to the life
immortal.”
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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