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The chiefest right of woman is in the shaping and settlement of the marriage question. The voice of civilization well enunciates this supreme doctrine. To commit this all-sacred matter to a congress of politicians, or to leave it to the narrow exactitude of the law-making department, is as barbaric as any monstrous thing the imagination can conceive. Not ruder was it in the warlike founders of Rome to seize the virgins as spoil, and make them wives to accomplish their empire-founding ambitions, than for a congress of American legislators to seize and prostitute the marriage question to their own political ends and popularity.
Can there be any doubt that the men of Washington have seized polygamy for their own ends? And are these men of the parliamentary Sodom of modern times the proper persons to decide the marriage question?
Will woman allow her sanctuary to be thus invaded and her supremest subject thus defiled?
If there is anything divine in human affairs it is marriage, or the relations between man and woman. Here love, not congressional law, must be the arbitrator. Here woman, not man, must give consent. It is the divine law of nature, illustrated in all civilized examples. What is not thus is barbaric.
Woman is chief in the consents of marriage. It is her right, under God her father and God her mother, to say to society what shall be the relations between man and woman—hers, in plain fact, to decide the marriage question.
The women of Mormondom have thus far decided on the marriage order of the patriarchs of Israel; for they have the Israelitish genius and conception of the object of man's creation. In the everlasting covenant of marriage they have considered and honored their God-father and God-mother.
In turn, the Gentile woman must decide the marriage question for herself. The law of God and nature is the same to her. The question still is the woman's. She can decide with or without God, as seemeth her best; but the Mormon woman has decided upon the experience and righteousness of her Heavenly Father and her Heavenly Mother.
A certain manifest destiny has made the marriage problem the supreme of Mormonism. How suggestive, in this view, is the fact that Congress, by special legislation, has made polygamy the very alpha and omega of the Mormon problem. The Mormon women, therefore, must perforce of circumstances, by their faith and action greatly influence the future destiny of Mormonism.
The enfranchisement of the Mormon women was suggested by the country, to give them the power to rule their own fate and to choose according to their own free will. Nothing but their free will can now prevail.