Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/509

Rh in the number of deaths; the father then must suffer an amount of domestic affliction terrible to contemplate, or undergo a progressive hardening of sensibility more to be deplored, even down to a point where the death of an offspring ceases to afflict. To use an awkward commercial phrase, can a man with fifty children, reasonably certain to follow fifteen or twenty to the grave, afford to mourn the death of each one? More than one bishop has a considerable graveyard filled with his own dead. One is said to have seventeen children buried in one row—the longest grave not over four feet. One within my knowledge has thirty-two children living and nineteen dead. Whatever might be the result under happier circumstances, I can only say this of the Mormons: No people in my ken regard death so little, especially the death of young children. They claim that this indifference is a product of their faith, "Death is but a step to a higher sphere;" but I apprehend a lively religious faith, even to the point of belief that an infant is in paradise, does not have that effect. I can understand that something of the same result might follow an excessively large family anywhere; and on this point, too, my observation in Utah convinces me that there is a certain normal size for a family, best attained and very rarely exceeded in monogamy, and that an increase beyond it is productive of misery rather than domestic happiness.

A very curious and subtile effect of polygamy is a tendency toward extreme reticence, habitual concealment of the feelings. It is often said by the Mormon preachers, and daily observation confirms it, that no people in the world keep their feelings and thoughts to themselves so well as the Mormons. Your host may be torn by internal torments, but you will' sit at his table many a day ere you discover it. This might be well enough, perhaps, but with it is closely connected an habitual deceit, which, of certain kinds, is all but universal in Utah. Its genesis is partly to be sought in polygamy. A man with more than one wife necessarily lives a lie, pretending an equal affection which he cannot possibly feel; and a policy of concealment is absolutely necessary to maintain peace. Going daily or weekly from one wife to another, he must preserve a determined reticence as to all that passed with the first, or resort to deceit. The wife, too, has her reasons for concealment or prevarication; it never would do to reveal her actual feelings if she means to retain her share of his affections. Whether this, continued through all the months of ante-natal growth, has a marked effect on the offspring, is a question for another branch of science; but certainly that or something else has affected the children of Utah. Deceit is a habit which easily extends from one thing to many, and the effects of this continual falsehood in polygamy are only evil and that continually. The polygamous nations are universally more deceitful in their social relations than the monogamous.

With this is to be connected another method in which polygamy