THE MORMON COMMONWEALTH 



fair a share of what it has created. Nowhere else has the 

 common prosperity been reared upon firmer foundations. 

 Nowhere else are institutions more firmly buttressed or 

 better capable of resisting violent economic revolutions. 

 The thunder-cloud which passed over the land in 1893, 

 leaving a path of commercial ruin from the Atlantic to 

 the Pacific, was powerless to close the door of a single 

 Mormon store, factory, or bank. Strong in prosperity, 

 the co-operative industrial and commercial system stood 

 immovable in the hour of wide-spread disaster. The sol- 

 vency of these industries is scarcely more striking than 

 the solvency of the farmers from whom they draw their 

 strength. No other Governor, either in the West or in the 

 East, is able to say what the Honorable Heber M. Wells 

 said in assuming the chief magistracy of the new State 

 in January, 1896. " We have in Utah/' said the young 

 Governor, "19,816 farms, and 17,684 of the mare abso- 

 lutely free of incumbrance." A higher percentage in 

 school attendance and a lower percentage of illiterates 

 than even in the State of Massachusetts, is another of 

 Utah's proud records. 



So far we have been dealing with facts that are be- 

 yond dispute. No one can deny that the Mormon indus- 

 trial and commercial system is correctly described in the 

 foregoing pages, nor that that system has made the peo- 

 ple remarkably prosperous in a*i economic sense. But 

 for the purposes of this book it is highly essential to 

 determine just what weight should be given to the Mor- 

 mon experience as a guide for future colonization effort 

 in the arid West, and to what degree the Utah system 

 is founded upon correct principles of industrial and 

 social economy. 



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