And away down the middle of the road scudded the little fellows in a confusion of dust and scrawk.
"Who are those children?" I asked again, thinking I had chanced on that unknown thing, a pauper Mormon.
"Oh," said my host, "he's a bad lot—an outsider—who came in here as a loafer, and deserted his wife. She's very ill and pretty nigh starving. Ay, she would starve, too, if her boys there didn't come round regular, begging of us. But loafers know very well that 'those——Mormons' won't let anybody go hungry. Ay, and they act as if they knew it, too."
In other settlements there are exactly such similar cases, but I would draw the attention of my readers—I wish I could draw the attention of the whole nation to it—to the following notice which stands to this day with all the force of a regular by-law in these Mormon settlements:—
"NOTICE TO ALL.
"If there are any persons in this city who are destitute of food, let them be who they may, if they will let their wants be known to me, privately or otherwise, I will see that they are furnished with food and lodging until they can provide for themselves. The bishops of every ward are to see that there are no persons going hungry.
"(Signed by the Presiding Bishop.)"
Now it may be mere "sentiment" on my part, but I confess that this "Notice to All," in the simplicity of its wording, in the nobility of its spirit, reads to me very beautifully. And what a contrast to turn from this text of a universal charity, that is no respecter of persons, to the infinite meanness of those who can write, as in the Salt Lake Tribune, of the whole community of Mormons as the villainous spawn of polygamy!"
It is a recognized law among the Mormons that no tramp shall pass by one of their settlements hungry; if it is at nightfall, he is to be housed. Towards the Indians their policy is one of enlightened and Christian humanity. For their own people their charity commences from the first. Emigrated to this country by the voluntary donations which maintain the "Perpetual Emigration Fund," each new arrival is met with immediate care, and being passed on to his location, finds (as I have described in another chapter) a system of mutual kindliness prevailing which starts him in life. If sick, he is cared for. If he dies, his family is provided for. All this is fact. I have read it in no books, heard it from no hoodwinking elders. My informants are lads just arrived in Salt Lake City—within an hour or two of their arrival, in fact; young men just settling down in their first log hut in rural settlements: grown men now themselves engaged in the neighbourly duty of assisting new-comers.
I have met and talked to those men—Germans, Scandinavians, Britishers—in their own homes here in Utah, and have positively assured myself of the fact I state, that charity, unquestioning, simple-hearted charity, is one of the secrets of the strength of this wonderful fabric of Mormonism. The Mormons are, more nearly than any other community in the world on such a scale, one family. Every man knows all the rest of his neighbours with an intimacy and a neighbourly interest that is the result of reciprocal good services in the past. This is their bond of union. In India there is "the village community" which moves, though in another arc, on the same plane as the Mormon settlement system. There, to touch one man's crop is to inflame the whole clan with the sense of a common injury. Here it is much the same. And as it is between the different individuals in a settlement, so it is between the different settlements in the territory. A brutal act, like that eviction of the Mormon postmaster at Park City the other day, disturbs the whole of Mormonism with apprehensions of impending violence. A libel directed at a man or woman in Salt Lake City makes a hundred thousand personal enemies in Utah. Now, with what petard will you hoist such a rock?