against the Mormons, though nothing could be done in consequence of the unsatisfactory state of the laws affecting such matters.

In 1873 Brigham entertained the project of abandoning Salt Lake City, and removing with the greater part of the saints to Arizona, but the unfavourable reports of the Mormon pioneers in that region compelled him to give up this plan. In June 1874 the first serious blow was struck at polygamy, when the Lower House accepted the principle of the Poland Bill, declaring that polygamist judges and juries were incompetent to conduct civil and criminal trials and prosecutions of polygamists. The object of this measure is to protect the Mormon women by ensuring to them a fair share of the family effects in case of divorce,-in a word, to alleviate the hard lot of those who have come to be regarded as female slaves. Meantime the Mormon women themselves seem to be anything but grateful to the Government for its efforts on their behalf. In the beginning of 1876 a petition was presented to Congress, signed by 22,626 Mormon wives and daughters, praying for the rejection of the law against polygamy, and for the admittance of Utah as a State of the Union. These female advocates of polygamy declare that no force or other unfair means have been employed to secure their signatures, and that no girls under twelve have been allowed to sign the document.

Since the year 1870 the largest accessions to their numbers have come from Denmark and Sweden, and quite recently they have been joined by many energetic East Prussians, possessed of considerable means. The Latin races, such as the French, Spaniards, Portuguese, and Italians, seem to be utterly opposed to Mormonism, and we are assured that not a single Frenchwoman is found in their seraglios. The great majority belong to the Anglo-Scandinavian races, though the Indian tribes

between California and Utah are also said to become Mormonised very rapidly.

On the other hand in the community itself a tendency is continually showing itself to revert to European views of morality and social habits. This is attributed by Hepworth Dixon not so much to moral motives as to the inherent feminine weakness for vanity, love of finery and dress. But the destruction of Mormonism will probably be ultimately due mainly to the Pacific Railway. Through it the hitherto unknown extravagance of the female fashions has penetrated into Great Salt Lake City, and if a man finds it difficult to indulge the taste of one wife for such things, most of them must shrink from the prospect of having to provide for the caprices of a numerous harem. Not every one is endowed with the colossal wealth of a Brigham Young, which alone could enable them to indulge in such a luxury, and the conviction is slowly gaining ground that from the economical point of view polygamy is a mistake. This idea once thoroughly established, it must gradually die out.

CHAPTER XVII.

MATERIAL PROGRESS.

1. Agriculture.

UNTIL recently agriculture formed by far the most important occupation of the Americans, giving employment to 22 per cent of the entire male population. The number of farmers possessing an average of 80 acres of land amounted in 1874 to some 3,000,000, and there is altogether as much as 734,000 square miles parcelled out in small allotments already under cultivation. A free grant of 160 acres is made to all immigrants willing to settle in the vast public lands of the Far West.

The entire arable area of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, is estimated at about a million and a quarter square miles, but it varies exceedingly in the nature of its products and the manner of its cultivation in the various States. There may, on the whole, be distinguished a northern corn-growing country, a central cotton, and a southern sugar, region. But the chief contrast is presented by North and South, roughly separated by the 37th parallel. In the Northern States, producing wheat, rye, barley, oats, buckwheat, and potatoes, we find the usual agricultural methods carried on by free labourers.

Of late years wheat especially has been grown to such an extent that America may yet enter the European market as the most formidable future rival of Russia, although under existing circumstances still unable to com