THE CONQUEST OF ARID AMERICA 



Poet or orator he could not have been ; seer, revelator, 

 and ecclesiastic he was not, save to the superstitious 

 vision of his blind followers ; but great, resourceful, and 

 of commanding personality he was a captain of industry, 

 an organizer of prosperity; and the Utah of to-day is 

 his undeniable claim to fame and his imperishable monu- 

 ment. 



So much for the man. "What of the Church ? It was 

 unquestionably the instrument used in the settlement 

 of Utah. It is being used to-day as an instrument in 

 settling portions of Canada, Mexico, and other localities. 

 Regarded simply as a Church, it is successful numerically 

 and financially. It is one of the few creeds where secu- 

 lar and religious affairs are brought into the closest as- 

 sociation, and, for this reason, it is generally believed 

 that church solidarity is the true explanation of the 

 economic prosperity of the Mormons. This conclusion 

 rests upon the theory that the Church sustains the in- 

 dustrial system. The writer emphatically dissents from 

 this notion, and confidently asserts that precisely the re- 

 verse is the truth that the industrial system sustains 

 the Church. 



The principles upon which the Mormon industrial and 

 social structure was reared have been carefully presented 

 in this chapter. These principles have worked success- 

 fully for fifty years. To determine the part which they 

 had in the actual result, let us ask ourselves this ques- 

 tion : Suppose the plans initiated by Brigham Young had 

 failed to give his followers the security of a home and 

 the certainty of a living ; that their co-operative industry 

 had produced losses rather than profits ; that their vil- 

 lage system had brought social discontent instead of 



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