What is polygamy like to-day? That is the question. Polygamy to-day, then, has settled down into the most matter-of-fact system that is possible for such exceptional domestic arrangements. In the first place, it is not compulsory, and some of the leading saints are monogamous. About one-fourth of married Mormons are polygamous, and of these something less than three per cent are under forty years of age. The bill of 1862 making polygamy penal effected little or no difference in the annual average of plural marriages, but since 1877 there has been a very sensible decrease.
These facts, then, seem to prove first that polygamy, though accepted as a doctrine of the Church, is not generally acted upon—and why? For the best of reasons. Either that the men cannot afford to keep up more than one establishment, or that they are too happy with one wife to care to marry a second, or that the first wife refuses to allow any increase of the household—all of which reasons show that polygamy is controlled by prudential and domestic considerations, and is not the indiscriminate "debauchery" that so many of the public believe it to be. It is also evident that the younger Mormons are not so active in marrying as the elder men were at their age, for ten years ago the proportion of polygamous Mormons under forty years of age was much greater, which may mean that the inaction of Congress was gradually working towards the end which the action of '62 thwarted. By legislating against polygamy, plural marriages increased—1863 to 1866 being as busy years in the Endowment House as any that ever preceded them—while by letting polygamy severely alone they have been decreasing.
Polygamy in fact, by the relaxation of the regime, now that Brigham Young's personal government has ceased, has taken its place as an ordinary civil institution, entailing serious responsibilities upon those who choose to enter into it, and not carrying with it such promises of temporal advantage as at one time were reserved for the plurally wedded. There is not the same enthusiasm about it that there was, owing probably to the diffusion among the people of a better sense of the position of women and of the opinions of the world with regard to polygamy. Under the administration of President Taylor there has been a marked disinclination in the Church to interfere with the domestic relations of the community, except, as I have said before, when reprimand or punishment seemed to be called for; and it is reasonable therefore to argue that the material decline in the number of plural marriages between 1878 and 1882 would have continued, the proportion of young enthusiasts have gone on decreasing and, as the elders died out, the total of polygamists become annually less. Such, I would contend, is the reasonable inference from the facts I have given.
Polygamy, as a problem, reminds me of a hedgehog. But as the hedgehog may not be familiar to my American readers, let me explain. The hedgehog, then, is a small animal with a very elastic skin, closely set all over with strong sharp spines. A rural life is all its joy. In habits and character it assimilates somewhat to the Mormon peasant, being inoffensive, useful, industrious, prolific, and largely frugivorous. But when hunted it is otherwise. For the hedgehog, if closely pursued, takes hold of its ears with its hind paws and, tucking its nose into the middle of its stomach, rolls itself into a perfect ball. The spines then stand out straight and in every direction equally. Nor, thus defended, does the hedgehog shun the public eye. On the contrary, it lies out in the full sunlight, in the middle of the sidewalk or the dusty high-road, a challenge to the inquisitive attention of every passing dog. And you can no more keep a dog from going out of its way to reconnoitre the queer-looking object than you can keep needles away from loadstones. They do not all behave in the same way to it, though. The mutton-headed dogs sit down by it and contemplate it vacantly, and go away after a bit in a kind of brown study. The silly ones smell it too close, and go off down the road in a streak of dust and yelp. The experienced dogs sniff at it and trot on. "Only that hedgehog again!" they say. The malicious prick their noses and lose their temper, and then prick their noses worse and lose their tempers more. The puppy barks at it remotely, receding every time by the recoil of its own bark, till it barks itself backwards into the opposite ditch. But the hedgehog lies perfectly still, as round and as spiny as ever, in the middle of the high-road. All the dogs are much the same to it. Some roll it a little one way, and some roll it a little the other. It gets dusty or it gets wet. But there it lies as inscrutable, puzzling, and odious to passing dogs as ever. By-and-by when it is dark, and everybody has got tired of poking it and sniffing it and wondering at it, the hedgehog will quietly unroll itself and creep away to some secluded spot betwixt orchard and corn-field, and remote from the highways of men and their dogs.
I am particularly led to this moralizing because a Mormon has just been enumerating, at my request, some of the more extraordinary anomalies that he knows of in recent polygamy. I took notes of a few, and they seem to me sufficiently puzzling to justify a place in these pages.
A young and very pretty girl, in "the upper ten" of Mormonism, married a young man of her own class, but stipulated before marriage that he should marry a second wife as soon as he could afford to do so.
A young couple were engaged, but quarrelled, and the lover out of pique married another lady. Two years later his first love, having refused other offers in the mean time, married him as his second wife.
A man having married a second wife to please himself, married a third to please his first. "She was getting old, she said, and wanted a younger woman to help her about the house."
A couple about to be married made an agreement between themselves that the husband should not marry again unless it was one of the relatives of the first wife. The ladies selected have refused, and the husband remains true to his promise.
The belle of the settlement, a Gentile, refused monogamist offers of marriage, and married a Mormon who had two wives already.