with the result that this peculiar intermingling kept them all
practically upon one level of social order; and the man who made adobes
under the hot sun of the desert through all the week might still be the
religious superior of the richest man in the local community, and they
met on terms of equality and friendship. Their children might
intermarry, the difference in wealth being countervailed by a difference
in ecclesiastical authority.

It was a strange social system, this, with Brigham Young and his coterie
of advisers, to the number of twenty-six, standing at the head,
self-perpetuating, the chief being able to select constantly to fill the
ranks as they might be depleted by death; and all these ruling over one
solid mass of equal caste who thought that the rulers were animated by
divine revelation, holding the right to govern in all things on earth
and with authority extending into heaven.

So firmly intrenched was their social system that when Brigham Young
passed away his various successors who came in time to his place by
accident of seniority of service found ample opportunity without
difficulty to perpetuate this system and to maintain their social
autocracy. As the matter has appeared so fully before the country, I
will not speak further of the method of succession, but will merely call
to your minds that after Brigham Young came John Taylor, then Wilford
Woodruff, then Lorenzo Snow, then Joseph F. Smith, the present ruler.

Under these several men the social autocracy has had its varying
fortunes, but at the present time it is probably at as high a point as
it ever reached under the original Joseph or under Brigham Young. The
president of the church, Joseph F. Smith, affects a regal state. His
home consists of a series of villas, rather handsome in design, and