endured hardships, privations, sufferings, torture and death.  Their settlement of Utah was one of extreme peril and anxiety, and for years it was a question whether they would survive or perish.  Had they been actuated by conscience, by pure religious zeal, by patriotism, by any of the nobler sentiments, they would have made an enviable reputation in history and gone down to posterity as a society commanding the respect and veneration of the world; but when it is known that no community or state even would tolerate them and that they sought this uninhabitable wild, this unknown and then foreign territory, to escape the punishment of their crimes, and to practise an abhorrent and barbarous tenet of their faith, their glory departs and they look and will look in the light of history abject and pitiable.  Some conception of their great undertaking in crossing the continent may be imagined when we reflect there were no roads, no known way across the vast arid plains, no mountain cuts, no bridged streams, no drinking water for miles upon miles with long tedious marches resulting in sickness and death.

To one acquainted with the country, knowing the obstacles they overcame, it is a matter of wonder that women and children were ever able to perform it.  It must be remembered that their destination reached, their trials had only fairly begun.  They were surrounded by savages, they were over a thousand miles from the habitation of a white man.  They had pitched their tents on an alkali plain that had never been tilled; not a blade of grass grew in the soil and this in a climate where not a drop of rain or even a cloud appeared for six months in the year.  Irrigation had never been tried, and the whole scheme was an experiment, the failure of which would have been fatal to the settlement.  The first winter was spent in their wagons and in tents, while their subsistence was upon a scanty supply of vegetables.  It is no more than common justice to accord to this people a great undertaking in founding the settlements of the territory, and a great triumph in their complete success; but above and beyond this, very little can be said in their favor.

The legal title of the Mormon church is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and in the church parlance, Salt Lake city is a state of Zion and the real Zion is at Jackson, Missouri, to which place the Mormons claim they are some day to return.  The Mormon church is a very complicated institution, but as perfect in its organization and operations as the Catholic church.  Church and State are inseparable and the main complications are in the priesthood which extends to nearly every male member of the church who has a family, thus making them all more or less responsible for the proceedings of their leaders.  This priesthood is composed of a president, in whom is combined prophet, seer or revelator of the church.  There have been only three men to fill that office, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor who now