THE MORMON COMMONWEALTH 



satisfaction what then ? Is it conceivable that religious 

 fanaticism could have held them together and lent such 

 an impulse to their growth that to-day, nearly a quarter 

 of a century after the death of Brigham Young, they 

 should be growing faster than ever before, maintaining 

 more missionaries and building more colonies in various 

 parts of the world ? Surely economic fallacy never pro- 

 duced such striking results as these in any other instance 

 known to history. 



It would perhaps be a tenable position to say that in 

 Utah a sound economic system, working in conjunction 

 with religious enthusiasm, produced the result now 

 known of all men ; but that would be very nearly equiva- 

 lent to saying that the only way to solve the problem of 

 reclamation and settlement in the arid regions is to turn 

 the task over to the Mormon Church and to advise all 

 who crave homes to join that organization. The writer 

 believes that the attraction of Mormonism has consisted 

 mostly in what it offered to the home-seeker, and that 

 the secret of its cohesion is the prosperity that has re- 

 sulted from its industrial system rather than the occult 

 power of its creed. 



Polygamy has so stirred the Christian world that no 

 man may speak in praise of any of the Mormon institu- 

 tions except at the risk of being misunderstood, or pos- 

 sibly regarded as an apologist for what the nation has 

 condemned as a crime against womanhood. On the 

 other hand, no candid mind can study the problem which 

 confronts the American people the problem of opening 

 the door to the masses of our citizenship upon the un- 

 used natural resources of the nation without realizing 

 that Brigham Young and the State he founded furnish 



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