The sisters were side by side with the most potent missionaries the Latter-day Church found. They made nearly as many converts to Mormonism as the elders. They were, often times, the direct instruments which brought disciples into the Church. The elders riveted the anchor of faith by good gospel logic, and their eloquent preachers enchanted the half-inspired mind with well-described millennial views, but the sisters, as a rule, by the nicest evangelical diplomacy brought the results about. They agitated the very atmosphere with their magical faith in the new dispensation; they breathed the spirit of their own beautiful enthusiasm into their neighborhoods; they met the first brunt of persecution and conquered it by their zeal; they transformed unbelief into belief by their personal testimonies, which aroused curiosity, or made their relatives and neighbors sleepless with active thoughts of the new, and inspired doubts of the old; they enticed the people to hear their elders preach, and did more to disturb the peace of the town than could have done the town-crier; they crowded their halls with an audience when without their sisterly devising those halls had remained often empty and cold. In the British mission--in England, Scotland and Wales--the sisters had much better missionary opportunities than in America. The vast extent of country over which the American people were sparsely scattered, forty to fifty years ago, and the almost immediate gatherings of the disciples to a centre place, or a local Zion, necessarily confined the missionary movement at home nearly exclusively to the apostles and their aids, the "Seventies;" and thus as soon as the disciples "gathered out of Babylon," American society lost even the little leaven which the elders had inspired in its midst. But in England, Scotland and Wales, and at a later period in Scandinavia, it was very different. Not merely one local Zion and a score of branches scattered over a score of States, but in the British mission at its zenith of progress there were over five hundred branches, fifty conferences, and about a dozen pastorates--the latter very like Mormon provinces or bishoprics. There the sisters had grand missionary opportunities. From village to town, and from town to city, they helped the elders push their work until this vast church superstructure was reared. With such a leaven as the Mormon sisterhood in Great Britain, converts were made so fast that it was nearly twenty years before even the immense yearly emigration of the saints to America began visibly to tell in weakening missionary operations in that prolific land.