- Somers Town—Euston Hall, 8 George Street, Hampstead Road.
- Holborn—148 Holborn, near Gray’s Inn Lane.
- Goswell Hall—46 Goswell Street.
- Holloway—1 Cornwall Place, Holloway Road.
- Whitechapel—Pisgah Chapel, North Street, Sydney Street, Mile End.
- Poplar—28 Penny Fields.
- Barking—Latter-Day Saints’ Chapel, North Street.
- Paddington—Hope Hall, Bell Street.
- Chelsea—Lloyd’s Assembly Rooms, 1 George Street, Sloane Square.
- Shepherd’s Bush—Latter-Day Saint’s Chapel, Shepherd’s Bush Green.
- Camden Town—Beulah Cottage, King’s Road, Camden Town.
On the Surrey Side of the Thames.
- Walworth Common—Latter-Day Saints’ Meeting Room, 2 King Street, Old Kent Road.
- Lambeth—St. George’s Hall, St. George’s Road, near the Elephant and Castle.
- Deptford—Latter-Day Saints’ Meeting Room, Tanner’s Hill.
- Woolwich—Latter-Day Saints’ Chapel, Prospect Row.
- Welling—Latter-Day Saints’ Meeting Room, Wickham Lane, near Welling.
- Eltham—Latter-Day Saints’ Meeting Room, at Mr. J. Baily’s, Pound Place.
Two points in this subject are truly remarkable. The first is the difference between Utah Territory and all other Anglo-Scandinavian colonies, in which males are usually far more numerous than females. The latter, at Utah, by the census of 1856, are 1781 in excess of the former; almost as great a disproportion as the extra three quarters of a million in England. The second is the rapid growth of the New Faith, and the deep hold which it has taken upon Great Britain. Few Englishmen are aware that their metropolis contains seventeen places of Mormon worship, and their fatherland an army of 4000 volunteer missionaries. In the United States it is also the fashion to ignore the Mormons. The subject, however, will grow in importance, and it is easy to predict that before two decades shall have elapsed, Deserét, unless sent once more upon her travels, will have forced herself into the position of an independent state.
MORMON POLITY.The Mormon polity is, in my humble opinion—based upon the fact that liberty is to mankind in mass a burden far heavier than slavery—the perfection of government. It is the universal suffrage of the American States, tempered by the despotism of France and Russia: in moderate England men have nothing of it but that Tory-Radicalism to which the few of extremest opinions belong. At the semi-annual Conferences, which take place on the 6th of April and the 6th of October, and last for four days, all officers, from the President to the constable, are voted in by direction and counsel—i. e., of the Lord through his Prophet; consequently, re-election is the rule, unless the chief dictator determine otherwise. Every adult male has a vote, and all live under an iron sway. His poor single vote—from which even the sting of ballot has been drawn—gratifies the dignity of the man, and satisfies him with the autocracy which directs him in the way he should go. He has thus all the harmless pleasure of voting, without the danger of injuring himself by his vote. The reverse, duly carried out, frees mankind from king and kaiser, and subjects them to snobs and mobs. Mormon society is modeled upon a civilized regiment: the Prophet is the colonel commanding, and the grades are nicely graduated down to the last neophyte or recruit. I know no form of rule superior to that of Great Salt Lake City; it might supply the author of “Happy Years at Hand” with new ideas for the “Outlines of the Coming Theocracy.” It exerts its beneficial effects equally upon the turbulent and independent American; the sensible and self-sufficient Englishman; the Frenchman, ever lusting after new things; the Switzer, with his rude love of a most problematic liberty; the outwardly cold, inwardly fiery Scandinavian; the Italian, ready to bow down before any practice, with the one proviso that it must be successful; and the German, who demands to be governed by theories and Utopianisms, “worked” by professors “out of the depths of their self-consciousness.”
The following description of a Conference is extracted at length from the “Daily Missouri Republican” of May 4, 1861:
Great Salt Lake City, April 12, 1861.
On the 6th of April, 1830, in a small room about fifteen feet square, in the town of Fayette, Seneca County, New York, a young country lad—Joseph Smith—and five other persons organized that movement now known throughout Christendom as “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” or Mormonism. How the units have each increased to tens of thousands, and where those disciples have been found, and how they have been converted, is not the task I assign myself. I assisted, as the Frenchmen say, at the thirty-first anniversary Conference of that obscure movement, and propose to give the readers of the “Republican” its picture, and “nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice.”
THE MORMON CONFERENCE.Twice a year the Mormons assemble in Conference, on the 6th of April and on the 6th of October, for the purpose of re-electing their presiding authorities, or making such changes among them as are deemed “wisdom” or “necessary”—the chiefs, also, making these periods seasonable for general instruction to the “body”—and in April electing and sending out missionaries to the nations of the earth, where Mormonism is flourishing, or where the New Faith has yet to be introduced.
As the settlements in the Territory are widely scattered, and communication between them rare—except where business or family purposes invite—the Conferences are looked forward to with peculiar interest by the people generally as a time of renewing acquaintance and friendship with those they have known and been associated with in the Old World. To this add the curiosity to see and hear again the “Prophet” and his associates, and the influences that draw the multitude to Conference is comprehended.