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352 assumed a jurisdiction independent of, and sometimes hostile to, the nine counties around them and to the States; to have attached penalties to speaking evil of the Prophet; and to have denied the validity of legal documents, unless countersigned by him who was also mayor and general. They are certainly changed for the better in these days. With respect to their future views, the anti-Mormons assert that Saints have now been driven to the end of their tether, and must stand to fight or deliver; that the new Territory of Nevada will presently be a fatal rival to them; that the States will no longer tolerate this theocratic despotism in the bosom of a democracy; and that presently they must be wiped out. The Mormons already discern the dawning of a brighter day. In the reaction which has taken place in their favor they fear no organized attack by the United States on account of lobby influence at Washington, and the vis inertiæ inherent in so slow and unwieldy a body as the federal government. They count upon secession, quoting a certain proverb touching conjunctures when honest men come in. They believe that the supernatural aid of God, plus their vote, will presently make them a state. "Some time this side of the great millennium" they will realize their favorite dream, restoration (which might indeed happen in ten years) to their quondam Zion—Independence, Mo., the centre of the old terrestrial Paradise. Of this promised land their President said, with "something of prophetic strain," "while water runs and grass grows, while virtue is lovely and vice hateful, and while a stone points out a sacred spot where a fragment of American liberty once was"—Lord Macaulay's well-known Zealander shall apparently take his passage by Cunard's—"I or my posterity will plead the cause of injured innocence, until Missouri makes atonement for all her sins, or sinks disgraced, degraded, and damned to hell, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched." Then shall the Jews of the Old World rebuild the Temple of Solomon, and the Jews of the New World (the Mormons) recover their own Zion. Gog and Magog—that is to say, the kings of the Gentiles—and their hosts shall rise up against the Latter-Day Saints, who, guided by a prophet that wields the sword of Laban, shall mightily overthrow them at the battle of Armageddon. Then the spears, bows, and arrows (probably an abstruse allusion to the descendants of our Miniés and Armstrongs) shall be burned with fire seven years; the earth and its fullness shall be theirs, and the long-looked-for millennium shall come at last. And as prophecy without date is somewhat liable to be vague and indefinite, these great events are fixed in Mr. Joseph Smith's Autobiography for the year of grace 1890. Meantime they can retire, if forbidden the Saskatchewan River and Vancouver's Island, to the rich "minerales" in "Sonora of the Gold Mountains."

On the morning of the next day, Sunday, the 16th of Septem-