# Mormonism: Its Leaders and Designs/Chapter 3
### Chapter III.

* Family arrangements
* Favorites
* The men
* Domestic happiness
* Sleeping alone
* Making tabernacles
* Mormon salvation
* Wife hunting
* Mothers and daughters married to one man
* Half sister
* The women
* First wives
* Whisky
* Termagents
* Adultery
* Jealousy
* Fanaticism
* Brigham on connubialities
* Single girls
* Proportion of the sexes
* Arguments used to induce young girls to marry polygamists in preference to young men
* Why they do not leave
* The children
* Mortality
* Barrenness
* Boys
* Girls
* Early marriages
* Divorce
* Mrs. M'Lean and Parley Pratt
* Mrs. Cobb and Brigham Young
* Utah marriages.
The only correct method of judging a cause, is by the effects that result from its operation. The most confounding argument against the Mormon doctrine of polygamy, is the Mormon practice of polygamy. The Mormons ever endeavor to conceal the real workings of their system from outside inspection. They must feel great confidence before allowing any one to grow intimate. One must be very intimate, before being competent to correctly describe their "family arrangements."
The intention of marriage was to increase personal happiness, to propagate a healthy offspring, and to secure to those children protectors, instructors, and support. What are the effects of polygamy on these objects?
​The Mormon polygamist has no home. Some have their wives lotted off by pairs in small disconnected houses, like a row of out-houses. Some have long low houses, and on taking a new wife build a new room on to them, so that their rooms look like rows of stalls in a cow-barn! Some have but one house and crowd them all together, outraging all decency, and not leaving even an affectation of convenience. Many often remain thus, until some petty strife about division of labor, children's quarrels, difference of taste, or jealousy of attention kindles a flame, only to be smothered by separation. When they live in different houses, they generally have different tables, and the husband has to give each house its turn to cook for him, and honor their tables with his presence in rotation. The evenings at his disposal, his constant distribution of himself among them, has to be by rule. Jealousies the most bitter, reproaches the most galling and disgusting, scenes without number, and acrimony without end, are the inevitable consequences of the slightest partiality. It is impossible for any man to equally love several different women; it is quite possible, however, for him to be equally indifferent about any number. The nature most in unison with his own, will most attract him. The most affectionate will be certainly preferred to the least affectionate. I am acquainted with scores of polygamists, and they all have favorites, and show partiality. To feel partiality, and not to exhibit it, is unnatural. To exhibit it, and for it to pass unnoticed by a jealous women, is impossible. For it to be noticed, is for it to be reproached.
The Mormon polygamist, therefore, has to maintain a con​stant guard over himself. Any husband might feel to kiss his wife gladly to go round a table and kiss half a dozen, is no joke. It is so in every thing with him. With a dozen eyes to notice at what time he retires to rest, or arises on any one occasion, and half a dozen mouths to talk about it, he must be perfectly governed by rule. Every look, every word, every action has to be weighed, or else there is jealousy, vituperation, quarreling, bitterness. For this reason, the idea of obtaining domestic felicity is ridiculed. Brigham is the model, and he to some extent adopts the dogma of the Quietists, "Repose is the only perfect happiness." He acts as though he felt, and wished others to feel, that man was the frigid master, performing every act of kindness, not as springing from his heart, but because he had reasoned it out, to be an act of duty. Warmth of feelings, tenderness of attachment, devotedness of attention to a woman, is there called, by that worst of Mormon epithets, "Gentilish." "Man must value his wife no more than any thing else he has got committed to him, and be ready to give her up at any time the Lord calls him," said Brigham one Sunday afternoon; and J. M. Grant followed the remark by saying, "If God, through his prophet, wants to give my women to any more worthy man than I am, there they are on the altar of sacrifice; he can have them, and do what he pleases with them!"
They carry this same coldness of affection into all their connubial relations. Brigham always sleeps by himself, in a little chamber behind his office. I have heard the leading men publicly advocate the adoption of this practice. They ​quote the animals as an argument in favor of polygamy, and adopt their instincts as models for practice. Marriage is stripped of every sentiment that makes it holy, innocent, and pure. With them it is nothing more than the means of obtaining families; and children are only desired as a means. of increasing glory in the next world; for they believe that every man will reign over his children, who will constitute his "kingdom;" and, therefore, the more children, the more glory! Said Brigham, September 20th, 1856, speaking on this subject:
"It is the duty of every righteous man and every woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can; hence if my women leave, I will go and search up others who will abide the celestial law, and let all I now have go where they please; though I will send the gospel to them."—Deseret News, October 1, 1856.
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