The prodigious contrast between the preaching and practice of polygamy was fully displayed. Mormons claim that there is a vast difference between bigamy and polygamy; that only good men are allowed to take plural wives; that no saint takes more wives than he can support, and that a muchly married "man of God" exercises the most rigid impartiality in the bestowal of his affections upon his various women. Miss Field upsets these beautiful theories by graphic pictures drawn from life, and cited Brigham Young himself as "a bright and shining lie to the boast of impartiality." Brigham Young's coup d'etat in granting woman suffrage in 1871 was illuminated, and emphasized by the assertions:—"A territory that has abolished the right of dower, that proclaims polygamy to be divine, that has no laws against bigamy and kindred crimes, that has no just appreciation of woman, is unworthy of self-respecting humanity, woman suffrage or no woman suffrage." Miss Field makes in these lectures a telling exposition of the doctrine of blood atonement, passing on to these Mormon missionaries and their methods, and the people who become "fascinated with the idea of direct communication with heaven through the medium of a prophet," and to whom the missionary brethren prudently "leave the mysteries of polygamy to the imagination," while they inculcate the importance of "gathering to Zion." She outlined the educational status and the discouragement given by Brigham Young to all educational progress. Of Mormon treason she says:—
"Five years after the United States had established the Territory of Utah its people were in armed rebellion because the government dared to send a Gentile governor and national troops to Utah."
Nor does she spare the United States in its responsibility for these crimes. "The United States to-day," said Miss Field, "is responsible for thirty years' growth of polygamy, with its attendant degradation of woman and brutalization of man." As an illustration of this conclusion, she told a most interesting story of which Governor Harding of Utah, Brigham Young, Benjamin Halliday, Postmaster General Blair, Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward were the characters. The story is a dramatic and significant bit of Mormon history, related for the first time. It led up to an earnest and eloquent peroration of which the final words were: "'I'll believe polygamy is wrong when Congress breaks it up; not before!' exclaims a plural wife. Men and women of New England! You who forge public opinion; you who sounded the death knell of slavery, what are you going to do about it!"
William Lloyd Garrison used to tell his friends that it was worth an admission fee just to see Kate Field on the platform, as she made so lovely a picture. Her attitudes—for they are too spontaneous and unconscious to be termed poses—are the impersonation of grace, and, aside from the enjoyment of the intellectual quality and searching political analysis of her lectures, is that of the artistic effect. She gave a course of three lectures on this "Mormon Monster." They were efforts whose invincible logic, graphic presentation and thrilling power held spellbound her audience. They were a drama of social and political life, and almost unprecedented on the lyceum platform was this eloquence and splendor of oratory, combined with the trained thought, the scholarly acquirement, and the finished eloquence of its delivery. This course of lectures finished there was a popular call for Miss Field to repeat one at Tremont Temple which, by invitation of Governor Robinson, the Mayor and a number of distinguished citizens, she consented to do. The triumph was repeated. From Boston she was invited to lecture in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Washington. Press and people were alike enthusiastic. It is to the work of Miss Kate Field more than to any other cause, that the present disintegration of Mormon treason is due. Other travellers in Utah have made but the briefest stays, and have been ready to gloss over the tale. Miss Field is telling the truth about it, and she does it with a courage, a vigor, an honesty, and a power that renders it one of the most potent influences in the national life of the times. Kate Field holds to-day the first place on the Lyceum platform of America. She has a rare combination of judicial and executive qualities. She is singularly free from exaggeration, and her sense of justice is never deflected by personal feeling or emotional impulse. She has that exceptional balance of the intellectual and artistic forces that enables her to give to her lecture a superb literary quality, and to deliver it with faultless grace of manner and an impressiveness of presence rarely equalled. In Kate Field America has a woman worthy to be called an orator.
THE MONUMENT AND HOMESTEAD OF REBECCA NURSE.
By Elizabeth Porter Gould.
Perhaps the greatest incentive to ideal living in a changing world is the firmly held conviction that truth will finally vindicate itself. When this vindication is made apparent, as in the case of Rebecca Nurse, one of the most striking martyrs of the Salem witchcraft days of 1692, the cause of human progress seems assured. For it is thus seen that truth has within itself a living seed which in its development is destined to become man's guide to further knowledge and growth. This idea was impressed upon me anew as I stood before the granite monument, some eight and a half feet high, erected this past summer in Danvers,—originally Salem,—to the memory of Mrs. Rebecca Nurse, by her descendants. A carpet of green grass surrounded it, and a circle of nearly twenty pine trees guarded it as sentinels. The pines were singing their summer requiem as I read on the front of the monument these words:—
REBECCA NURSE,