FRUITS OF "MORMONISM."

"By their fruits ye shall know them. Do men gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles? Can an impure fountain send forth pure water?"—JESUS.

Bishop D. S. Tuttle—now and for years past an Episcopal clergyman in Salt Lake City—in a lecture on "Mormonism," published in the New York Sun, November, 1877, held these views:

"In Salt Lake City alone there are over 17,000 Latter-day Saints, Now, who are they? I will tell you, and I think, that after I have concluded, you will look on them more favorably than you have been accustomed to do. Springing from the centre of your own State (New York) in 1830, they drifted slowly westward until they finally rested in the basin of the Great Salt Lake. I know that the people of the east have obtained the most unfavorable opinion of them, and have judged them unjustly. They have many traits that are worthy of admiration, and they believe with a fervent faith that their religion is a direct revelation from God. We of the east are accustomed to look upon the Mormons as either a licentious, arrogant or rebellious mob, bent only on defying the United States Government and deriding the faith of the Christians. This is not so. I know them to be honest, faithful, prayerful workers, and earnest in their faith that heaven will bless the Church of Latter-day Saints. Another strong and admirable feature in the Mormon religion is the tenacious and efficient organization. They follow with the greatest care all the forms of the old church."

From the caustic pen of Henry Edger, in the New York Evolution, July, 1877:

The Federal Government is doing at this moment a great injustice to the 200,000 Mormons in Utah. We have no right to demand any conditions of Mormons more than Presbyterians or Methodists. The Federal Government engaged in a crusade of extermination against a people with such a record as the Mormons have to show, is a spectacle of which no one can be proud. Unfortunately we need not go out into the Rocky Mountains to find debasing, superstitious and immoral practices, sheltering themselves under the cloak of religion; nor do we need go to Utah to find polygamy openly and shamelessly practised. A polygamy which sacrifices utterly and dooms to a fate most horrible all the wives but one, deceiving and betraying her also, is surely not very much morally superior to a polygamy that, for the first time in modern society, completely shuts out that horrible social institution, prostitution. That the government of the United States can virtually introduce the brothel, the gambling house and various other charming New York institutions into Salt Lake under color of abolishing Mormon polygamy is unhappily only too plainly evident. Driven by mob violence from one State to another, despoiled of their legitimate possessions—fruits of honest toil—this despised and grossly wronged people found their way at last across the trackless desert and by an almost unexampled perseverance and industry created an oasis in the desert itself.

Elder Miles Grant, the Adventist, and editor of The World's Crisis, says:

"After a careful observation for some days, we came to the settled conclusion that there is less licentiousness in Salt Lake City than in any other one of the same size in the United States; and were we to bring up a family of children in these last days of wickedness, we should have less fears of their moral corruption, were they in that city than in any other. Swearing, drinking, gambling, idleness, and licentiousness have made but small headway there, when compared with other places of equal size."

In a late visit of Governor Safford, of Arizona, to a "Mormon" colony on the Little Colorado, he writes:

We were kindly received by the colonists, numbering some 400 souls, who made us welcomed and gave us freely of such comforts as they had, as this people do to all strangers who come among them. Every one works with a will. They have no drones, and the work they have accomplished in so short a time is truly wonderful. All concede that we need an energetic, industrious, economical and self-relying people to subdue and bring into use the vast unproductive lands of Arizona. These Mormons fill every one of the above requirements. Tea, coffee, tobacco and spirituous liquors they do not use. They are spoken of by those living nearest to them as the kindest of neighbors, and all strangers receive a hearty welcome among them. They have a splendid robust looking lot of children, and are very desirous of having schools.

General Thomas L. Kane, of Pennsylvania, says:

I have given you in terms the opinion my four years' experience has enabled me to form of the Mormons, preferring to force you to deduce it for yourselves from the facts. But I will add that I have not heard a single charge made against them as a community—against their habitual purity of life, their willing integrity, their toleration of religious differences of opinion, their regard for the laws, their devotion to the constitutional government under which we live—that I do not, from my own observation, or upon the testimony of others, know to be unfounded.

Chief Justice White, formerly of Huntsville, Alabama, in charging the Grand Jury, Salt Lake City, February, 1876, said:

I do not utter the language of prejudice, nor treat lightly or derisively the Mormon people or their faith. No matter how much I differ from them in belief, nor how widely they differ from the American people in matters of religion, yet testing them and it by a standard which the world recognizes as just, that is, what they have practised and what they have accomplished, and they deserve higher consideration than ever has been accorded to them. Industry, frugality, temperance, honesty, and in every respect but one, obedience to the law, are with them the common practices of life.

This land thy have redeemed from sterility, and occupied its once barren solitudes with cities, villages, cultivated fields and farm houses, and made it the habitation of a numerous people, where a beggar is never seen and alms houses are neither needed or known. These are facts and accomplishments which any candid observer recognizes and every fair mind admits.

United States Prosecuting Attorney Dickson:

It was a matter of history that the Mormons did not cohabit together, in the sense as used by the other side, without a form of marriage, and it was alone this form of marriage and the practice under it, and not sexual sins, that Congress was legislating against. They knew that those sins are not upheld in Utah, but are condemned by the Mormons and deplored by the Gentiles; they recognized the Mormon system of marriage as a constant menace against monogamous marriage, and thus legislated against it, and it was the prevention of its continuance that was the primal object of the law. The cause and necessity of the act showed its intention and the only objects against which it should be directed; and for this it could be extended to its full purpose. The design and only purpose of the law was to root out and extirpate polygamy. The two systems of marriage could not dwell side by side. If polygamy was allowed to grow, without being placed under the ban of the law and of public opinion, it would in the end supplant the monogamic system, and was a constant threat and menace to and jeopardized the latter, and Congress so viewed it.

The following statistics covering the year 1882, obtained mainly from Gentile sources, furnish their own comment.

Let the reader bear in mind that the non-"Mormons" of Utah are clamorous for the enforcement of unconstitutional laws against the "Mormons," for the purpose of purifying their morals and Christianizing their practices.

These men and their associates, are the ones, who engage in the wholesale denunciation of the "Mormon" people.