all his people to obey the marriage laws of the land. At a general conference, Woodruff's pronunciamento concerning plural marriages was accepted as 'authoritative and binding.' This was ultimately received by the country as a renunciation of polygamy, and the popular aversion to the Mormons gradually subsided.

In answer to an appeal made by the Mormon hierarchy for a general pardon for themselves and their followers, supplemented by a promise to obey the laws, President Harrison, on January 4, 1893, issued a proclamation granting an amnesty to all persons liable to the penalties of the Edmunds act, who had, since November 1, 1890, refrained from polygamy. A bill to enable the people of Utah to frame a constitution and set up a state government, the constitution to provide for the toleration of all forms of religion, for the establishment and maintenance of a system of public schools free from sectarian control and open to the children of the whole state, and for the prohibition of polygamy, passed Congress without a division, and was signed by President Cleveland on July 16, 1894. A constitution which met these requirements was framed by a convention which assembled in Salt Lake City in March, 1895. It was ratified by the people in November, and the contest which began when Brigham Young, in 1850, asked for the creation of the State of Deseret, closed on January 4, 1896, by Utah's admission into the Union 'on an equal footing with the original states.'

VI

'I congratulate all of you, my fellow countrymen, on the richness which your valley spreads out before us, and on the industry and intelligence of your people, the fruits of which I see everywhere around me.'

Thus Mr. Taft saluted the residents of the little city of Provo, out at the western foothills of the Wasatch, when, on September 24, 1909, he passed through that region on his tour to the Pacific. It was just sixty-two years and two months earlier, and forty-five miles to the northward, that Orson Pratt, heading the advance couriers of the saints, wrote these words in his journal: 'In about two hours after our arrival we began to plough, and the same afternoon we built a dam to irrigate the soil, which at the place we were ploughing was exceedingly dry.' Provo and its neighborhood showed Mr. Taft one of the results.

On September 25, from the tabernacle in Salt Lake City, in the place from which Brigham Young, in the earlier age, hurled defiance at the laws and the President of the United States, a President of the United States, as the guest of Young's people, talked of religious and political toleration, and praised that people's patriotism and educational progress. And an especially interested hearer was Young's successor, Joseph F. Smith, nephew of Joseph Smith, the prophet, and son of Hyrum.

Not only does the despised and hunted sect which began to cross the Wasatch in 1847, comprise a large majority of the three hundred thousand people of Utah to-day, but it ranks first among the religious denominations of Idaho, and second among those of Wyoming and Arizona. "The settlements of our people,' said Joseph F. Smith, in a recent newspaper article, 'extend from a group of colonies in the province of Alberta, in Canada, down through the wide-spreading Rocky Mountain valleys of the United States to another group of colonies in Northern Mexico.' And, including the author of the foregoing words, some are alive who made the hegira with them from Nauvoo,

In its returns for 1906 the Census Bureau placed the number of members of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, in round figures, at two hundred and fifty-six thousand. Forty thousand of these, however, belong to the Reorganized Church, which rejected polygamy and separated from the parent body in 1852, when it incorporated that practice in its creed. The headquarters of the Reorganized branch are in Lamoni, Iowa, and its president is Joseph Smith, son of the prophet. Through the activity of its missionaries in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, the Utah church is increasing with great rapidity.

For more than six years past Recd Smoot, one of the leading members of the Mormon hierarchy, has been in the Senate at Washington, and he was recently elected to another term. Mr. Taft's party, which in its platform of 1856 denounced polygamy as a relic of barbarism, and which enacted nearly all the laws directed against that practice, has swayed the politics of Utah most of the time since its admission to statehood. Salt Lake City, however, has been controlled for a few years past by a local organization called the American party, composed chiefly of Gentiles and of Mormons who oppose church domination in secular affairs. At Sharon, Joseph Smith's birthplace, in the Republican State of Vermont, a monument was erected to him in 1905.

In the government building at the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition at Seattle, Mr. Taft, as well as tens of thousands of the other visitors, saw

mons as colonizers of the West. Wagons were there which accompanied Young's pioneer corps from the Missouri to Salt Lake in 1847. There also was an odometer, invented by two of the pioneers, which was used by this advance detachment of the saints in measuring the day's march, and in computing the distance between the starting-point of the expedition at Winter Quarters and its arrival at the lake. And the government engineers who went over the route in later times testified that its work was marvelously accurate. Likewise the press was there on which the Deseret News was printed in 1850 and for years afterward. This was the first printing-press to cross the plains, and the News was the first paper to make its advent in the Rocky Mountain region. And to this day it is one of the most widely read and influential journals in its territory.

And another exhibit was there which, it is to be hoped, Mr. Taft did not miss:

Pioneers camped here

June 3d 1847 making 15 miles to-day All well

Brigham Young

At the sight of these words, traced on the skull of a buffalo, as a guide to the friends who were behind in the great hegira, imagination rouses itself. From the shadow of the past, long-vanished yesterdays emerge. The West's wild, free, vivid days return. With its hardships, its heroism, its romance, and its story of splendid achievement written across the landscape of half a continent, the old trail lives for us again.

-

AN expert on Greek art chanced to describe in my hearing one of the engraved gems in the Metropolitan Museum. He spoke of it as certainly one of the great gems of the world,' and there was something in his tone that was even more thrilling than his words. He might have been describing the Parthenon, or Beethoven's Mass, such was the passion of reverence that flowed out of him as he spoke. I went to see the gem afterwards. It was badly placed, and for all artistic purposes was invisible. I suppose that even if I had had a good look at it, I should not have been able to appreciate its full merit. Who could save the handful of adepts in the world, the little group of gem-readers, by whom the mighty music of this tiny score could be read at sight?

Nevertheless it was a satisfaction to me to have seen the stone. I knew that through its surface there poured the power of the Greek world; that not without Phidias and Aristotle, and not without the Parthenon, could it have come into existence. It carried in its bosom a digest of the visual laws of spiritual force; and was as wonderful and as sacred as any stone could well be. Its value to mankind was not to be measured by my comprehension of it, but was inestimable. As Petrarch felt toward the Greek manuscript of Homer which he owned but could not read, so did I feel toward the gem.

What is Education? What are Art and Religion and all those higher interests in civilization which are always

vaguely held up to us as being the most important things in life? These things elude definition. They cannot be put into words except through the interposition of what the Germans call a 'metaphysic.' Before you can introduce them into discourse, you must step aside for a moment and create a theory of the universe; and by the time you have done this, you have perhaps befogged yourself and exhausted your readers. Let us be content with a more modest ambition. It is possible to take a general view of the externals of these subjects without losing reverence for their realities. It is possible to consider the forms under which art and religion appear, the algebra and notation by which they have expressed themselves in the past, and to draw some gen

eral conclusion as to the nature of the subject, without becoming entangled in the subject itself.

We may deal with the influence of the gem without striving exactly to translate its meaning into speech. We all concede its importance. We know, for instance, that the admiration of my friend the expert was no accident. He found in the design and workmanship of the intaglio the same ideas which he had been at work on all his life. Greek culture long ago had become a part of this man's brain, and its hieroglyphs expressed what to him was religion. So of all monuments, languages, and arts which descend to us out of the past. The peoples are dead, but the documents remain; and these documents themselves are part of a living