Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/511

Rh cited before the High Council, as promptly resigned, and the Church nominee was declared elected. A few dissenters in the Thirteenth Ward of Salt Lake City combined with non-Mormons and elected Bishop Woolley to the City Council. He was cited before the School of the Prophets, and subjected to savage abuse by Brigham Young, humbly apologized for his presumption, and resigned; and the regular nominee took the seat. It was the last attempt of that nature inside the Church. That patriotic class of religionists who want an amendment declaring ours a "Christian Protestant Government" would have been delighted with the state of Utah; it was a "religious government" in the broadest sense of the words. The modified theocracy set up in New England by the Puritans was red-republican communism in comparison.

Here and there an individual grew restive under this régime, but took good care to say nothing openly; for of all reformers those who strive to rescue men from a mental slavery receive the bitterest opposition from those they seek to aid. If such found the condition intolerable, they quietly slipped out of the Territory and sought a community where public opinion was not so oppressively unanimous. If, as sometimes happened, one failed in the attempt, there was a "man missing—supposed to have been killed by the Indians"—as duly reported in the Church paper. As to the fate of these missing men we are mostly without legal proof, but find a number of candid statements in various sermons preached by the heads of the Church. As instance the following from Brigham Young:

Of course, if we should see this quotation in a hostile report, we should reject it at once as a fabrication; but it is in the "Journal of Discourses," with a score of similar passages, the whole book being published by the Mormon Church and indorsed on the title-page by Brigham Young and his councilors. The curious reader may find the doctrine of killing apostates explained and commended in that work, viz.: vol. i., pp. 72, 73, 82, 83; vol. ii., pp. 165, 166, et seq.; vol. iii., pp. 226, 234, 235, 237, 241, 246, 247, 279, and in many other passages.

The results of this peculiar system of securing unanimity were curious indeed—well worth the study of the sociologist. The society became perfectly homogeneous. All traces of mental independence vanished. The people even ceased to care for it apparently. A rigid paternalism governed every detail of the social organism under the guise of what was called "counsel by the priesthood." There was