members. When, in recent years, Congress legislated against this
practice, the church fought for its peculiar institution to the
last, its leading members accepting exile and imprisonment; and
only the certainty of continued exclusion from the rights of
citizenship, and the hopelessness of securing the long-desired
prize of statehood for Utah, finally induced the church to bow to
the inevitable, and to announce a form of release for its members
from the duty of marrying more wives than one. Aside from this
concession, the Mormon church is to-day as autocratic in its hold
on its members, as aggressive in its proselyting, and as earnest
in maintaining its individual religious and political power, as
it has been in any previous time in its history.

In its material aspects we must concede to the Mormon church
organization a remarkable success; to Joseph Smith, Jr., a
leadership which would brook no rival; to Brigham Young the
maintenance of an autocratic authority which enabled him to hold
together and enlarge his church far beyond the limits that would
have been deemed possible when they set out across the plains
with all their possessions in their wagons. But it is no more
surprising that the Mormons succeeded in establishing their
church in the United States than it would have been if they had
been equally successful in South America; no more surprising that
this success should have been won in the nineteenth century than
it would have been to record it in the twelfth.

In studying questions of this kind, we are, in the first place,
entirely too apt to ignore the fact that man, while comparatively
a "superior being," is in simple fact one species of the animals
that are found upon the earth; and that, as a species, he has