ROUGHING IT....excerpt

"'But at last a Gentile said, 'Go to Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any good.' I did not think much of the idea, for if the 'law' could not help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good patriarch in a church and a preacher in its tabernacle, but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred refractory subcontractors. But what was a man to do?... "Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said 'Take this list of names to So-and-So, and tell him to have the men here at such and such an hour.' "They were there to the minute. So was I . Mr. Young asked them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement good. Then he said to them: "'You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?' "'Yes.' "'Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go! "And they 'did' go, too! They strung across the deserts now, working like bees. And I never heard a word out of them. There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here, shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government--but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king!... "Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention to the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here--until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically 'homely' creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, 'No--the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindest applause of mankind , not their censure--and the man that marries sixty of them had done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.'" P.609-610, ROUGHING IT by Mark Twain (1984)