SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS IN UTAH. 48 1 



the monogamous ; as witness Germans and Turks, Russians and Per- 

 sians, Britons and Hindoos. 



Similarly, polygamy would add from 30,000 to 40,000 children per 

 year to the population of Massachusetts, with no increase whatever in 

 the number of producers. In eighteen years, at least 500,000 non-pro- 

 ducers would be added to the Commonwealth. The first result would 

 be, as the pressure slowly increased, that children would be withdrawn 

 from school at an earlier age, and put to severer tasks, women would 

 more and more be forced into the field and workshop, with still a de- 

 cided increase of poverty. Despite these extra exertions against it, 

 cases of want would greatly multiply ; all the weaker constitutions 

 would encounter extra risks, because there would be both extra exac- 

 tions upon them, and less surplus to provide for their extra wants ; 

 and thus the evil temporarily avoided in one direction would come 

 around with redoubled force in another. Where monogamy, legally 

 enforced, possibly prevents the birth of 30,000 children annually, 

 polygamy would in time result in more than 30,000 extra deaths ; 

 there would, meantime, be less of average food, clothing, school- 

 books, cheap excursions, and healthful amusements, less of everything 

 that makes life possible or desirable, a decided increase in the aggre- 

 gate of unhappiuess, and still a dead loss in the wealth of the com- 

 munity. That all these results are to be witnessed in Utah is the 

 testimony of travelers of every shade of belief, though Utah is a new 

 country, and free from many of the difficulties which would be met 

 with in Massachusetts. 



At this point a side-issue presents itself, which it may be well to 

 consider. My observation in Utah, and comparison with Eastern com- 

 munities, convince me that there is a certain normal rate of increase, 

 beyond which it is scarcely possible for an Anglo-Saxon community 

 to go ; or, if possible, very undesirable. I mean, of course, natural 

 increase, immigration being left out of the account. Settle a new 

 country with nearly equal numbers of the sexes, and the population 

 will increase very rapidly as long as the unappropriated wealth of 

 Nature continues ; it will even double, from natural causes alone, 

 every twenty-five years, until most of the land is occupied. Then a no- 

 ticeable decline in the rate of increase will ensue ; and such rate will 

 decrease with almost constant regularity as the population increases. 

 It will be manifest in three ways : people will marry later in life, suc- 

 cessively larger numbers will remain unmarried, and the average num- 

 ber of children to each family will be less. The large number of 

 unmarried women in Massachusetts, the considerably smaller number 

 in Indiana, and the very small number in California, are thus seen to 

 be legitimate results of the relative ages of those communities. Of 

 course, new inventions, enabling each producer to get more of the 

 necessaries of life from the same amount of labor, will have a similar 

 effect to that of unappropriated natural wealth, and this enables some 



VOL. IX. 31 



