POLYGAMY IN LOW LIFE—THE POOR MAN’S FAMILY.
POLYGAMY IN HIGH LIFE—THE PROPHET’S MANSION.
To face p. 302.
In a very large house, with many wives, there is greater safety and peace for the husband than in a small house with only two wives. When there are only two apartments, the husband, if not in one, is supposed to be in the other, and the neglected wife frequently expresses her opinion of her rival in the opposite room in very powerful language. Scenes may be witnessed in such households which are too shocking to disclose. Brigham Young was conscious of this when he said he “would stand no more fighting and scratching around him”; and yet, in the face of all this, he dares to tell the people that this is the “Order of Celestial Marriage.” With many wives living together in a large house there are many advantages. The whereabouts of the husband is not so easily discovered, and the unhappy or jealous wife is at a loss to know upon whom to vent her ire. On this account even men with small means prefer to have three wives instead of two, as each wife, not knowing which of the other two she ought to hate the most, divides her jealousy. It takes, however, a wise man to know how to live in Polygamy, so as to balance all the conflicting interests and obtain a little peace, if happiness is out of the question.
Where the husband is a rich man and has abundant wealth wherewith to supply the wants of his numerous wives and children, and to furnish all the necessary accommodation that a growing family demands, much of the jealousy and ill-feeling inseparable from Polygamy can, to a certain extent, be avoided.
It would be quite impossible, with any regard to propriety, to relate all the horrible results of this disgraceful system. It has debased the minds and degraded the lives of good and honest men and women, while those who naturally had a tendency towards evil have become a hundred times worse. Marriages have been contracted between the nearest relatives; and old men tottering on the brink of the grave have been united to little girls scarcely in their teens; while unnatural alliances of every description, which in any other community would be regarded with disgust and abhorrence, are here entered into in the name of God, and under the sanction of a “Revelation” supposed to proceed from the pure and holy Saviour.
I was much shocked and disgusted when first I went to Utah, to find a man whom under other circumstances I had known in London, living with two sisters whom he had married in the manner I have just described, and, strange as it may appear, it was not with them a matter of necessity. When I knew the husband in Europe, I considered him a man of education and refinement; but I certainly was mistaken, for no man whose nature was at all sensitive would have lived as he did. His wives, too, who had been considered highly respectable English girls, were not ashamed of their degraded position; they professed to believe in bringing the world back to its primitive purity and innocence.
It is quite a common thing in Utah for a man to marry two and even three sisters. I was well acquainted with one man who married his half-sister, and I know several who have married mother and daughter. I know also another man who married a widow with several children; and, when one of the girls had grown into her teens, he insisted on marrying her also, having first by some means won her affections. The mother, however, was much opposed to this marriage, and finally gave up her husband entirely to her daughter; and to this very day the daughter bears children to her step-father, living as wife in the same house with her mother!