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Show THE ANTI-MORMON AGITATION. We have received a circular letter from Thomas Moyne? Hoyne?, John Wentworth, Herrick? Henrick? Johnson, J. Hall Dow, George Willitts? and E. F. Cragin, a committee appointed at a recent anti-polygamy mass meeting held in Chicago. We know some of these gentlemen personally, and the rest of them by reputation, to be sober minded citizens, who rarely become unduly excited on any subject, and we are a little surprised to discover in their letter evidences not only of singular excitement in themselves, but of a desire also to throw us into a state of perturbation, and by means of The Evening News, to excite and agitate this goodly and peaceful commonwealth of Michigan. And about what? Simply because certain persons in the territory of Utah and there abouts [thereabouts], instead of enjoying connubial plurality in succession, like the average American, prefer to have all their wives at once. They ask us in substance to get right up and howl about this Utah custom, to stir up our esteemed contemporaries about it, to call meetings about it in halls and school houses, and to precipitate a flood of petitions, letters, and personal solicitations on the subject upon our delegation in congress. We must respectfully but firmly and calmly decline this task. Our declination is based upon a ?? of reasons. A few of them are sufficient. We are not excited upon the subject; and, in spite of the most arduous and conscientious efforts in the direction, we cannot become excited. Nor do we think the gentlemen of the committee, nor the average congressman, just now howling at the Mormons, are really as excited as they would have the public believe. The public at large are not excited, and do not intend to get excited. That is plain. They may attend meetings - as they would go to Oscar Wilde's lectures, if they were free; and they may vote for indignant resolutions framed in advance by the projectors of the meetings; and they may sign petitions - who refuses to sign a petition? - but they are perfectly calm and almost indifferent. The man of common sense does not lay awake nights thinking about the personal vices of his fellow citizens, if those personal vices do not affect his own happiness or his own peace. He may be satisfied with one wife himself, or he may content himself without any - and many wise men have approved the latter as the safer course - but he will not concern himself seriously about the connubial condition of his neighbor, so long as the latter keeps the peace, is honest, does not publicly misuse his own or more connubial companions, and so long as the wife or wives chiefly concerned are satisfied with the situation. The man of common sense takes this view of the Mormon question, not only for that he desires to mind his own business and not interfere with that of his neighbor, but because he knows perfectly well that it is the supremest [most supreme] folly to attempt, by legislation, to prevent his neighbor from having two or more wives, if his neighbor can afford it and the wives are willing. It can't be done. If it could be done, the man of common sense, even if he did get excited on the subject, would not begin in Utah, but at home, where he is perfectly well aware bigamy and polygamy and even polyandry, in some form or other, is practiced all about him every day. He knows that in this Christian city, there are hundreds, nay thousands, of men who live in open polygamy, hundreds of women who are guilty of polyandry, and that he and the society of which he and they are parts, cannot discover or apply a remedy. He, therefore, in time, becomes content to govern his own domestic affairs, and to leave others to govern theirs. He - if he be of the sort - lives in as much peace as possible with his own one wife, and cares not how many his neighbor has, so be that his neighbors do not ask the community to support any of them. Since he knows that he cannot regulate the connubial affairs of his own townsmen, he will not attempt to regulate those of people a thousand miles away which affect him still less, as his failure would be all the more complete. We have no doubt that if many of the honorable congressmen, who grow hysterical in public over the polygamy of Utah, were to look into their mirrors as they declaim, their reflected faces would stare them out of countenance. - Detroit Evening News. |