SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS IN UTAH. 485 



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. What- 

 ever might be the result under happier circumstances, I can only say 

 this of the Mormons : No people in my ken regard death so little, es- 

 pecially the death of young children. They claim that this indiffer- 

 ence 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 obser- 

 vation 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 domes- 

 tic 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 ha- 

 bitual 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 neces- 

 sary to maintain peace. Going daily or weekly from one wife to an- 

 other, 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 



