of Mormon architecture. Thirty Sultanas are
intended to occupy this harem, which has already
cost 30,000 dollars, and is far from being
finished."* Public offlices, a public library, and
a social hall or temple, are grouped around.
Activity reigns everywhere; there are no idle
or unempployed persons; and it must also be
added to the credit of the Mormons, that no
grog-shops or gaming-houses are met with, and
that disturbances are said to be unknown.

* Journey to Great Salt Lake City, &c. By
Jules Rémy. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1861, Vol. i. p.
193.

It is curious that in this vast and almost
unexplored desert of Utah, there should have
risen into strength and opulence, a new sect,
holding opinions so offensive to all civilised
nations, that there seemed at first no possibility
of their being allowed room to grow. Whatever
we may say and feel with regard to polygamy—
the peculiar institution of Mormonism—it has
commended itself to a large and varied section
of the human family in the Western world, as
well as in Asia; for we are told that there are
now in Great Salt Lake City (named in order of
numerical importance), English, Scotch,
Canadians, Americans, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians,
Germans, Swiss, Poles, Russians, Italians,
French, Negroes, Hindoos, and Australians,
besides a stray Chinese. All these differ in
country, language, customs, laws, nationality,
and tastes, and have flocked together to live in
harmony, in independence of the central
authority of the States. The population of the
Mormon sect is estimated at about sixty thousand.

Brigham Young, the successor of the
celebrated Joe Smith, is the supreme president of
these Latter-day Saints throughout the world
—the Pope of the Mormons—a prophet and a
seer—the recognised and lawful governor of the
territory of Utah—the husband (in 1855) of
seventeen wives, and the father of an unknown
progeny. He would seem to be a remarkable
man, and to have persuaded himself that he
believes, more or less, in the peculiar tenets of
the Mormon faith, whatever they may be. He
has under him two vice-papal potentates, several
apostles, a commander-in-chief of the army, a
sacred historian, a head of the record office,
an editor of the official journal, and a grand
patriarch; there are also judges and other local
authorities. It is certainly a proof of power
that an uneducated man should have been able
so long to keep together the strange assembly
of jarring elements collected in the plain arouud
the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

The medical profession is not encouraged in
the city of the Salt Lake, nor is the practice of
the law very profitable. Most of the converts
work at mechanical employments, and the wages
obtained by the labouring classes are large
enough to secure a livelihood for all. The poor
work for the rich; or, if there be not rich
enough, the Church finds employment.

The exodus of the Mormons from Nauvoo,
Illinois, when they were driven, and their march
to their new and almost unknown land, was a
very trying and painful part of their history.
Like the Israelites of old, they travelled with
their flocks and herds, their wives and little
ones, and their course lay through an enemy's
country. Rivers and mountain-passes had to
be crossed, and food and shelter were very
scarce. At last, after a journey of nearly a
thousand miles, the pioneers of the party reached
the Great Salt Lake, and the main body of the
emigrants gradually arrived and established
themselves in their new country. Water was
found, wood was found, stone was found, soils
were cultivated, and the city now stands a
singular monument of the latest variety of
religious fanaticism. Not a pleasant one to reflect
upon, as suggesting that, despite all the advances
of education and of science, men remain more
inclined to follow impulse than reason, and more
willing to accept an absurdity offered to them
than to think for themselves.

There was one great trial in store for the
Mormons after their successful establishment.
It was the discovery of gold in California. In
those early days of the little settlement, the
advice of Brigham Young to his followers was
this: "Gold is fitted to pave the streets with, to
roof houses, and to make plate. The treasures
of the earth are in the storehouses of the Lord;
raise grain, build cities, and God will do the
rest." The Mormons did so, and—so far—have
flourished.

EASY BOOTS.

SHOULD we like to part with our corns? For,
if so, they are doomed. A time has come when
every free man, enjoying free use of his feet,
can, if he will, walk his two dozen miles a day,
probably with more ease than his bootmaker
has hitherto let him enjoy in walking ten. When
each of us shall feel that he has ten toes to go
upon and not a pair of wedges that he only
wishes were of wood like the last to which they
are fashioned, and insensible to all the twinges
that afflict the temper, scorn shall arise of trains,
and carriages, and cabs, except as economists of
time, for with what happy independence will the
holiday Londoner discover the complete use of
his legs! Let it no more be a truth that nobody
walks who can ride, but let our custom rather
be that nobody rides who can walk. There
shall be grief then in omnibus yards, and shoe
reform may be as good as a new street for the
relief of overcrowding from horse-trafflic. It is
— if the bootmakers would only understand that
fact— easier in every sense to adapt boots and
shoes to the feet, than to adapt the feet to the
customary form of boots and shoes. The time
has come for every foot to kick at the
bootmaker's last, for within the last three or four
years, science has really concerned itself  to such
good purpose with the settlement of the
principles on which a man's foot should be shod,
that as shape goes, the fashion of a boot
or shoe may be perfected. The healthy foot