How these dozen or twenty wives get along without heart-burnings and hairpullings I can't see.
There are instances on record, you know, where a man don't live in a state of uninterrupted bliss with one wife. And to say that a man can possess twenty wives without having his special favorite, or favorites, is to say that he is an angel in boots—which is something I have never been introduced to. You never saw an angel with a Beard, although you may have seen the Bearded Woman.
The Mormon woman is early taught that man, being created in the image of the Saviour, is far more godly than she can ever be, and that for her to seek to monopolize his affections is a species of rank sin. So she shares his affections with five or six or twenty other women, as the case may be.
A man must be amply able to support a number of wives before he can take them. Hence, perhaps, it is that so many old chaps in Utah have young and blooming wives in their seraglios, and so many young men have only one.
I had a man pointed out to me who married an entire family. He had originally intended to marry Jane, but Jane did not want to leave her widowed mother. The other three sisters were not in the matrimonial market for the same reason; so this gallant man married the whole crowd, including the girl's grandmother, who had lost all her teeth, and had to be fed with a spoon. The family were in indigent circumstances, and they could not but congratulate themselves on securing a wealthy husband. It seemed to affect the grandmother deeply, for the first words she said on reaching her new home were: "Now, thank God! I shall have my gruel reg'lar!"
The name of Joseph Smith is worshipped in Utah; and, "they say," that although he had been dead a good many years, he still keeps on marrying women by proxy. He "reveals" who shall act as his earthly agent in this matter, and the agent faithfully executes the defunct Prophet's commands.
I have somewhere stated that Brigham Young is said to have eighty wives. I hardly think he has so many. Mr. Hyde, the backslider, says in his book that "Brigham always sleeps by himself, in a little chamber behind his office;" and if he has eighty wives I don't blame him. He must be bewildered. I know very well that if I had eighty wives of my bosom I should be confused, and shouldn't sleep anywhere. I undertook to count the long stockings, on the clothes-line, in his back yard one day, and I used up the multiplication table in less than half an hour. It made me dizzy—it did!
In this book I am writing chiefly of what I saw, and to elaborately denounce, at this late day, a system we all know must be wildly wrong, would be simply to impeach the intelligence of the readers of this book.
PART V. ARTEMUS WARD IN LONDON.
THE LONDON PUNCH LETTERS.