energies. They have no time, and if time, no disposition to attend to the mental culture of their children. There are always too many domestic quarrels to adjust; some old wife to scold, or some new wife to court. What they have not time to attend to themselves, they have no money to pay others for. The Salt Lake system of schools is merely a farce and a name (see chapter on Schools). Their children are impatiently turned over to their mother and their aunts, as they call them, who drive them out of their little crowded houses. They companionize with children bigger than themselves; go with them to herd cattle; become early inured to vice, and accustomed to foul thoughts and words; premature observers of the brute creation; practicing, many of them, the worst vices, and making the most sacredly private matters of their families a jest for their playmates. As soon as they can crack a whip or use a hoe, they have to work to help support their brothers and sisters. Education is neglected, and consequently despised. The habits of men are contracted at the age of boyhood. Many of their parents, themselves born in the backwoods, encourage their precocity. Their cheating the confiding, is called smart trading; mischievous cruelty, evidences of spirit; pompous bravado, manly talk; reckless riding, fearless courage; and if they out-talk their father, outwit their companions, whip their school-teacher, or out-curse a Gentile, they are thought to be promising greatness, and are praised accordingly. Every visitor of Salt Lake will recognize the portrait, for every visitor proclaims them to be the most whisky-loving, tobacco-chewing, saucy and precocious children he ever saw. It is true, however, that the Mormons have been driven from place to
