fascinated by its penalties, if not tempted by its
pleasures. For the strength of Mormonism is
in its religious fervour; and this is a power
which nothing can crush. Right or wrong,
the Mormon believes what he practises, and
lives up to what he believes. His is no Sunday
religion, taken out to be aired once a week,
then laid aside as something unfit for the
remaining six days: it is a religion of every
day and every hour. But its doctrine of
polygamy, in which now lies so much of its
success as a social organisation, will
eventually prove its ruin. In a country where
there are seven hundred and thirty thousand men
in excess of women, human nature will not bear
the selfishness of the polygamist; and where,
in certain other parts, men have to perform
women's work because of the dearth of women,
it cannot long be conceded that in other parts
women should be reduced to the level of mere
nurses and servants because of their excess.
In some of the western regions, the disparity
is such as strikes the moralist with awe; in
California there are three men to every woman,
in Washington four, in Nevada eight, in
Colorado twenty, while in the whole mass of
whites throughout the United States generally
the disproportion is five in the hundred. What
is hardly less strange than this large displacement
of the sexes among the white population is the
fact that it is not explained and corrected by
any excess in the inferior types. There are
more yellow men than yellow women, more red
braves than red squaws. Only the negroes are
of nearly equal number, a slight excess being
counted on the female side.

"This demand for mates," writes Mr. Dixon,
"who can never be supplied, not in one place
only, but in every place alike (Utah alone excepted),
affects the female mind with a variety of plagues;
driving your sister into a thousand reckless
agitations about her rights and powers; into
debating woman's era in history, woman's place
in creation, woman's mission in the family; into
public hysteria, into table-rapping, into
anti-wedlock societies, into theories about free-love,
natural marriage, and artistic maternity; into
anti-offspring resolutions, into sectarian polygamy,
into free trade of the affections, into community
of wives. Some part of this wild disturbance
of the female mind, it may be urged, is due to
the freedom and prosperity which women find
in America as compared against what they enjoy
in Europe; but this freedom, this prosperity,
are in some degree at least, the consequence of
that disparity in numbers which makes the hand
of every young girl in the United States a positive
prize." " I was very bad upon him, but I
got over it in time, and then let him off," said a
young and pretty woman of a favoured lover,
whom afterwards she had rejected; and " in that
phrase lay hidden," says Mr. Dixon, " like a
password in a common saying, the cardinal
secrets of American life, the scarcity of women
in the matrimonial market, and the power of
choosing and rejecting which that scarcity
confers on a young and pretty woman."

The result is that a revolution is preparing
in America— a reform of thought and
of society— a change in the relations of man to
woman which is not unlikely to write the story
of its progress on every aspect of domestic life.
The revolutionists and reformers are the women
themselves. They are in a manner the dominant
party, and mistresses of the situation.
They care nothing for men's jests and gibes,
but demand absolute equality of the sexes as
a divine law and a human right; and repudiate
as a shameful sin the absorption of the wife
in the husband, and his power over her, as
has been ever the rule throughout all
Christendom — in greater extent than in the East.

Of the remaining sects and communities which
Mr. Dixon mentions, none are more curious
and unnatural than the Shakers of Mount
Lebanon. Here, in direct opposition to
Mormonism, celibacy is the rule of life and the
acted law of God; and, with celibacy, the most
skilful care of the soil, the most perfect order,
temperance, frugality, worship, spiritual seerism,
cleanliness, and wholesome life. But no love,
no maternity, no marriage. Yet there is a
peculiar preference and a certain spiritual
selection among the brothers and sisters, which,
though it may not be called love in the Gentile
sense, is something as near akin to it as any of
the United Society of Believers in Christ's
Second Appearance may indulge. The Elderess
Antoinette, with whom Mr. Dixon lodged, told
him, " in the presence of four or five men, that
she felt towards Frederick, her co-ruler of the
house, a special and peculiar love, not as towards
the man, and in the Gentile way, as she had heard
of the world's doing in such matters, but as
towards the child of grace, and agent of the
Heavenly Father." She told him, also, that she
had sweet and tender passages of love with many
who were gone out of sight— the beings whom
we should call the dead— and that these passages
of the spirit were of the same kind as those she
enjoyed with Frederick.

In the Shaker houses the ladies sleep two
in a room; the men have separate rooms;
the ladies have looking-glasses, but are warned
against vanity. " Females," says Elder Frederick,
"need to be steadied some." They are
free in the matter of colour and material for
dress, but they are strictly confined to shape;
they eat in silence, thrice in the day— at six in
the morning, at noon, and at six in the evening
— rallying to the sound of a bell, and filing into
the eating-room in a single line— women to one
end, men to the other. After a silent prayer
on their knees, they help themselves and each
other as they list, without compliments or thanks;
and they are strict vegetarians. They are active
in work— no man suffered to be an idler, not
even under the pretence of study, thought, or
contemplation; they believe in variety of labour
as a source of pleasure, and pleasure is the
portion meted out by an indulgent Father to his
saints; and their farms, their schools, their
scents, and all their other industries, are
acknowledged to be the best in the United