years and discipline have brought me since my impetuous girlhood days, I would have lifted up my voice and wept.

Partly was I grieved for them in their awful delusion; for human reason brought so low, for deadly fanaticism that blights every fairest flower of the beautiful soul, so rampant in its credulity, when in our own sublimated land and sunlit century it ought to be so balanced and serene. But as a woman, my sense of outrage and humiliation was beyond language. The highest ideals of noble souls in all ages were here trampled under foot by those who verily thought they did God service. The lofty companionship of Two heads in council, two beside the hearth," on which Home's sacred citadel is founded, how it is blotted out in the "Church of the Latter Day Saints"! Woman becomes the servitor of man, having no promise of heaven save through her relations to him, and he, whose relations to her are intended to exalt and purify every faculty of his nature, loses his loftiest and sweetest hopes of manly character. Childhood, too, is defrauded of its most precious inheritance, the tender guardianship of faithful parentage, and fond tie of brother and sisterhood. "About twenty brothers and sisters," said young Cannon. What can he know of the close love of our fireside groups in Christian families? A young lady of Salt Lake City said with a twinge of pain upon her face, "My father has at least forty children; I do not think he would know me should he meet me on the street." Three Mormon ladies called upon me at Salt Lake; one was the editor of The Woman's Exponent, another was an accomplished lady physician, educated in Philadelphia and Boston, the third had been a wife of Brigham Young. All were bright women, leaders of their church. At first I did not know that they were Mormons, and when, in speaking of that as voting day, two of them said, "The government of the United States has disfranchised us because we are polygamists," I simply replied, “On that question I have my own opinion, but the temperance work is the only reform about which I care to express myself in Utah." They had avowed their interest in our society, and I was glad of this. Said Mrs. Young, "A wise general will not on the eve of battle, ask the religious opinions of his soldiers, but rather this question, Are you ready to do battle against our common foe.'" As years have passed, our society has, however, taken

Grave of Brigham Young.

327

higher ground than this and come out squarely against such Mormons as persist in the practice of polygamy.

We went to Brigham's grave as a wonder of its kind, being to an American woman the most obnoxious on the whole circle of the planet. Three tons of granite in one block were hardly needed to hold him from aerial heights, his own specific gravity settled that matter! But he is thus hedged in to keep his bones from desecration, probably, and his only dead wife (poetic justice that, with this exception, the whole outfit should survive him!) has no stone nor flower to mark her grave. What an oversight on the part of the loving sisterhood, who, with her, shared his affections.

By the way, we saw a most inferior woman hurrying from a Mormon house, when one of us commented upon her stolid appearance and the other remarked, "Eternal fitness! only the fifth part of a woman would ever take up with the fifth part of a man." The prettiest place we saw was "Rose Bud Cottage," a Mormon, but not a polygamous home, completely embowered in trees and vines, the latter being trained over strings, so that they lay as a roof of greenery overhead, along the garden paths. Nothing more sylvan, cool and restful could greet one's eye.

Salt Lake with its Mormon and "Gentile" population has every convenience and luxury of any city; has "Gentile" society of the forcible type that dares consecrate life to setting up the American civilization among a people essentially alien in purpose and life. Altogether we never had a more curious, pleasant, pathetic trio of days than in far-famed "Deseret."

Ogden, Utah, is a far lovelier town than we are taught. Doubtless it has improved since becoming a railroad center of five different roads. Its summer climate is delightfully tempered by "the canyon breeze," which blows nearly one half of the twenty-four hours, and the near neighborhood of this same delightful valley affords to the home people such facilities for camping out as must go far to conserve their health, rejuvenate their spirits and drive dull care away. If asked in my own life, and that of our fevered Americans, the greatest mistake and deprivation, I would say: "Great Nature has n't half a chance to soothe, enrich and nurture us; we go touring,' but we do not let the calm old mother take us to her heart and sing the

328

Notes of Southern Travel.

lullaby that we sigh for without knowing what we miss." Only blurred and misty revelations of God can come to souls so worn and travel-stained. When we temperance workers go to the sea or to the mountains, it is still to wring from our tired brains a few more thoughts for public utilization or a little "stored up energy" of magnetism for a "summer audience." May the valleys, trees and skies forgive us this profanation of their sanctuaries and this profane substitution of our restless glances and babbling tongues for their sacred liturgy.

SOUTHWARD HO!*

My first trip of three months (1881) spent in blessed work for the homes and loved ones of a most genial, intelligent and heartily responsive people, made me quite in love with the South. To think they should have received me as a sister beloved, yet with full knowledge that I was that novel and unpalatable combination (as a Richmond gentleman said) "a woman; a Northern woman, a temperance woman!" I had been told that to speak in public in the South was "not to be thought of, that all would be lost if I attempted anything beyond parlor meetings. But instead of this, their liberality of sentiment was abundantly equal to the strain; their largest churches were filled with the best, most influential and thoughtful people; their ministers were more united and earnest in the temperance cause than ours at the North; their editors, without the slightest subsidizing, were as kind and helpful as my own brother could have been. Nay, the only grief I had was in being spoken of so much better in every way than my own consciousness bore me witness that I merited.

From the first the Southern ladies took up our quiet, systematic lines of work with an intelligence and zeaí that I have never seen exceeded and seldom equaled. There was an "ourfolks" air in audiences, cars, and on the streets that was quite refreshing. The native population is so regnant, colored popula

In my book entitled "Woman and Temperance" I have given an extended account of my Southern trips, now numbering six, hence these brief notes.

New Orleans Exposition.

329

tion is of such home-like nature, and the foreign element so insignificant in influence and numbers, that temperance has an immense advantage at the South. Beer has no such grip on the habits or the politics of the people as at the North. Almost without exception the gulf and seabound states have taken advance ground. The time is ripe; "the sound in the mulberry trees" is plainly audible. I have now made five trips thither, and always with the same warm welcome.

On a later journey I spent a week in New Orleans at the time of the famous Exposition.

Here our natural point of rendezvous was the booth of the National W. C. T. U.; en route thither we passed through an immense park with an avenue of live-oaks that would be a glory in itself were it in Central Park or the Bois de Boulogne. We climbed the slow, graded stairs of the great government building, and turning to the right came upon a home-like oasis in the desert of strangeness, for from a hundred costly banners, white and golden, blue and emerald, representing every state and territory of the great Republic, gleamed on every side the magic legend that we love, "For God and Home and Native Land." Here at last were the flags, and pennon fair, and brilliant gonfalon of the Ohio Crusade and the Continental white ribboners!

At three o'clock of that day, I was expected to preside and speak on behalf of the National W. C. T. U. The auditorium. seated over eleven thousand persons, and the only blunder of the Exposition was that the music of the Corliss engine drowned all competing voices. The engine did not stop until four o'clock and we were to begin at three. Fancy a vibrant soprano unable to hear itself in all the whiz and roar of a cataract of sound where the most capacious lungs could not reach over a thousand persons even when the machinery was motionless! But the advantage of speaking there was that a stenographic reporter sat just beside me, and the audience that hears with its eye, got my ideas next morning in the Times-Democrat and Picayune. We went through the pantomime of a meeting. Bro. Mead pitched the tune "Coronation," but to the rumbling orchestra of that remorseless "Corliss," our singing was like the chirping of a sparrow when an avalanche is falling. I went through the motions of calling off the parts, and bravely that sweet-voiced gentlewoman,

330

A Temperance "Stint."

Mrs. Judge Merrick, went to the front and articulated the Crusade Psalm, after which Mary T. Lathrap offered prayer. Then gallantly came to our rescue broad-shouldered Governor St. John, and talked against time until the horrible mouthing of that pitiless engine ceased. The great audience was in good humor, and deserting the chairs, stood closely around him, eager to catch every word, while he spoke in frank, soldierly fashion to the men who once had worn the gray, even as he had the blue, and predicted the good time coming. That Governor St. John is a man who can "tire out" almost any other on the platform is well known, but as a tour de force I have never seen equalled the speech of this afternoon when, as he declared should be the case, he "wore out" the Corliss engine. At four o'clock Mrs. Lathrap and I made brief addresses, and Mrs. Wells read the song salutation dedicated to Louisiana W. C. T. U. by Indiana's white ribbon poet, Mrs. Leavitt, of Vernon. Wearier women have slept the sleep of the just, perhaps, but more willing dreamers never were, than the twain-Matilda B. Carse and I-who retired from view at seven P. M. that night.

As a temperance worker, I was devoted to my "stint," as I called it, which consisted of presenting the white-ribbon cause, not only in every capital, but in every other town and city in our country that by the census of 1870 had 10,000 inhabitants. This was completed in 1883.