Returning to the East she stopped on the way in Missouri and at Nauvoo, Illinois, looking up all the old camping-grounds of Mormonism, and meeting and interviewing people who had been connected with it, including two sons of Joseph Smith, Miss Field opened her course of lectures on this subject in Boston last November, before a brilliant and distinguished audience, including the Governor and other officials of state, Harvard University professors, and men and women eminent in art, literature and society. She dealt with the political crimes of the Mormons, arguing that the great wrong was not, as many had believed, polygamy, but treason! Polygamy, though "the cornerstone of the Mormon church," was not inserted in its printed articles of faith and was not taught until the unwary had been "gathered to Zion." The monstrosity of the "revelation" on celestial marriage; the tragic unhappiness of Mormon women; the elastic conscience of John Taylor, "prophet, seer and revelator" to God's chosen people, were vividly depicted. Her extracts from Brigham Young's sermons, and from those of his counsellors, are forcible arguments on the Gentile side. Indeed, throughout her entire discourse, Miss Field clinches every statement with Mormon proof, rarely going to Gentile authorities for vital facts connected with her subject. The lecturer's sense of humor betrayed itself now and then, when, with fervor, she related an incident in her own experience, or quoted a "Song of Zion." The refrain of one of these songs still rings in our ears:
Then, oh, let us say God bless the wife that strives And aids her husband all she can To obtain a dozen wives!
The prodigious contrast between the preaching and practice of polygamy was fully displayed. Mormons claim that there is a vast difference between bigamy and polygamy; that only good men are allowed to take plural wives; that no saint takes more wives than he can support, and that a muchly married "man of God" exercises the most rigid impartiality in the bestowal of his affections upon his various women. Miss Field upsets these beautiful theories by graphic pictures drawn from life, and cited Brigham Young himself as "a bright and shining lie to the boast of impartiality." Brigham Young's coup d'etat in granting woman suffrage in 1871 was illuminated, and emphasized by the assertions:--"A territory that has abolished the right of dower, that proclaims polygamy to be divine, that has no laws against bigamy and kindred crimes, that has no just appreciation of woman, is unworthy of self-respecting humanity, woman suffrage or no woman suffrage." Miss Field makes in these lectures a telling exposition of the doctrine of blood atonement, passing on to these Mormon missionaries and their methods, and the people who become "fascinated with the idea of direct communication with heaven through the medium of a prophet," and to whom the missionary brethren prudently "leave the mysteries of polygamy to the imagination," while they inculcate the importance of "gathering to Zion." She outlined the educational status and the discouragement given by Brigham Young to all educational progress. Of Mormon treason she says:--