THE MORMON PERIL | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 7, 1879

THE MORMON PERIL.

In one of his preludes last winter, Joseph Cook spoke as follows of the danger of the admission of Utah as a State:—

“Place before Mormonism the broad shield of State rights, and very possibly the defense will be vulnerable only by the bayonet. Utah once admitted to the Union will govern herself, and her peculiar institutions will be out of the reach of Congress. Polygamy imitates slavery in seeking to intrench itself behind the fateful bulwark of State rights. Of course the clamor is becoming very loud for the admission of Utah, since she now has 130,000 people, and Nevada was admitted with 40,000. That historic political party which denounced slavery and polygamy as twin relics of barbarism, and cut the former of these cancers off the breast of America by the long, deep plunges of the sword through five years of civil war, is no longer in power in Congress. In the exigencies of political strife a time may easily arrive when the prize of two senators and several representatives will induce the dominant party at Washington to admit Utah with polygamy. The agent of that territory is authorized to give the vote of Utah to the party which admits her with her peculiar institutions. Mormonism possessed of State rights and defying American law is the blackest threat in the low, lurid vapor which lies behind Pike’s Peak in the sunset. Beyond the Mormon cloud the Chinese question spreads itself across the deepest Western sky, as a dull, thunderous, copper haze. So distant, however, are the lightnings that peer fitfully at the East from over the stern shoulders of the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, that we hear little of the local thunders, and dream that both the black and the copper cloud will dissolve soon, and without storms. In precisely this indifference of ours to these distant threats lie their chief dangers.”