Henry Reed

“ In one sense, at least, the marriage bond includes a sacred obligation. It is an alliance, the status quo ante of which cannot be restored by its annulment. This may be of little moment to the male, but it is of incalculable importance to the female party. She is made homeless. She is an outcast in the eye of the law which has made her a criminal; and in the estimate of society, is depreciated. If there can be a duty resting upon a court of justice more sacred than another, it is the duty to interpose and guard the helpless against the machinations of the malignant. ”

“ The question includes an inquiry into the ultimate law of human society; the substratum and sanction of all laws of convention—statutes and constitutions—and the basis of the social, domestic and industrial economies; in short, the unwritten common law of humanity. There is such a law. It is the law which mankind represent, not in their doctrines, theories, bigotries or sentimentalisms, but in their lives; it is the law of constitution and character, not of faith, dogma or opinion. ”

“ Has not the government of the United States enough on its hands of communities in disorder, that it needs to turn upon and inaugurate anarchy in another? Government may create a solitude and call it peace ”

“ While in one sentence it gives the information that society is founded upon marriage, and in the next that government is founded upon society, in the very next it conveys the astounding intelligence that it is within the legitimate power of government to take jurisdiction of the fabric of society and to appoint the relations in which its factors are to stand to each other. According to the deliberate opinion of the Supreme Court of one of the moat enlightened of modern nations, society and government hold to each other the positions of mutual creators and created. Society creates government ”

“ It is not surprising that strait-laced members of Congress, who, at once, console themselves for the absence of wives left at home and set a laudable example of economy to their children, by having a mistress, who keeps herself, in each of the departments, should feel the urgent need of dog something signal, as well to drag the nation from the verge of the abyss into which it is preparing to plunge, as to demonstrate their own domestic loyalty, and their indehble hatred of every form of luxurious indulgence. ”

“ Humanity, infinitely various, is only measurable by itself. The ultimate rule of the moral is the actual. The relations into which communities of human beings spontaneously settle, by virtue of their intrinsic affinities and gravities, and under the impulsion of their tastes, desires and necessities, is the right as regards such communities; and, being the right, is their fundamental law. In other words, the principle upon which society organizes itself is the organic principle of such society ”

“ Are human rights or the principles of justice, or the maxims of jurisprudence, or the relations of society, or immemorial usages to be allowed to stand as impediments where a moral pestilence prevails, a plague-spot which threatens universal contamination is to be canterized, and a crying national sin eradicated? ”

“ It is the fundamental doctrine of modern communism that government is the creator of society, from which it infers—and logically—that the jurisdiction of government comprehends not only the domestic, commutual and proprietary relations of the social elements, but their unrelated acts, conduct, habits, pleasures and indulgences. ”

“ It is the faith of the leveler, who clamors for uniformity; who would obliterate the difference between the sexes; would compel all the young to be educated according to a common measure and model; would equalize estates by division or by destruction; would war against property honestly acquired and tax the industrious to support the idle; would abolish all the great industrial enterprises on account of the incidental disparities of which they are the occasion, and institute a regimen of hate, envy and anarchy. ”

“ Future generations of lawyers and legislators would, perhaps, have grown up wiser if the Supreme Court of the United States had found it convenient to cite the canons of interpretation whereunder a constitutional clause which contemplates only property, affords legitimate sanction to a statute which contemplates only persons. ”

“ Compelled to purchase order at the expense of hypocrisy, society dares not turn its reluctant senses upon the pool of corruption, only too palpable, in which it wades; and the clamors of an accusing conscience, or the protests of honest censure are met by pretenses of disgust, or promises of reform, or professions of piety, or complaints that the law does not execute its mission and restrain or punish the offenders. ”

“ Francis Lieher, a philosopher, who infers from the fact of certain coincidences, that a certain form of domestic order is correlative with a certain form of civil institutes: in other words that polygamy and arbitrary government are inherently allied. If it could be shown that monogamy and popular government were invariably, or even generally, coincident, the argument would have some validity. As the case stands, it has none whatever. There is no evidence that the principles of civil government vary with either domestic or social conditions. ”

“ Except in the case of a single community, custom, in the United States, prescribes one wife at a time as the proper domestic allotment; and, accordingly, where such is the rule, the marital covenant is monogamous in its conditions. The husband promises to marry no other woman, the wife, to marry no other man; and this agreement is enforced under statutes which provide to annul fraudulent after-marriages, and to punish the perfidious party for the commission of a crime, for centuries known to criminal jurisprudence as "Bigamy." ”

“ In a new country, as the United States, there are no customs of which it may, in strictness be said "the memory of man runneth not to the contrary," and, hence, here, the term is not a complete expression of the principle. Every custom which is coeval with the community in which it prevails complies with the spirit of the rule under which immemorial customs have, in all ages, been held as the law.
The custom of plural marriages—polygamy—had its beginning with the birth of the community within which it prevails. It is therefore, to every legal intent and purpose, an "immemorial custom." ”

“ Politicians, in no long time, find that there are votes latent in the movement. Party platforms expand their liberal bosoms to receive the new doctrine. Legislators become impressed with its magnitude and find it expedient to respond to so distinct an expression of popular sentiment; and judiciaries, not to be delinquent in so noble a cause, tax their ingenuities to find law to suit the situation. Thus it is that courts are constrained to sit in judgment upon sentimentalisms.
Nevertheless, states of society are not to be judged by their own sentimental law, which is always in their favor ”

“ It is not the liberty to obtain which the revolution was prosecuted. It is not the popular freedom which the Constitution was ordained to institutionize and conserve.
It does not appear, from the opinion of the court, whether or not the question of the constitutionality of the statute upon which the indictment was predicated, was raised by the counsel for the plaintiff in error. ”

“ Every person having a husband or wife living who marries another, whether married or single, in a territory or other place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdiction, is guilty of bigamy, and shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars, and by imprisonment for a term of not more than five years; but this section shall not extend to any person by reason of any former marriage, whose husband or wife by such marriage is absent for five successive years, and is not known to such person to be living ”

“ They knew, if the statesmen of the present day do not, that no authority placed in the hands of a body liable to be inflamed by popular bigotries, and swayed by transient fanaticisms could be more perilous, or more apt to be hastily and unjustly exercised, than the authority to dig beneath the civil state and tamper with the social basis upon which it is founded ”

“ Its defects are affirmed to be intrinsic; the necessary outgrowths of its unsound constitution. They are cankers, plague-spots, demanding the knife and the cantery, applied not merely to the diseased tissue, but to the body in which they originate. Hence they feel it their duty to agitate, and the uneasy of their species do agitate. They are prepared to make great sacrifices—not of their own goods and chattels, perhaps, but of the ease and peace of mind of the reprobates—in order that the land may be disenthralled. They find it in the line of their duty to make the naughty, uncomfortable. ”

“ There is no ground for the assumption, that the statesmen of the centennial are any more sagacious or far-seeing than the statesmen of the revolutionary period. There is no warrant for the conceit that, in the presence of real or imaginary, civil, social or domestic exigencies, the Constitution may be expanded to mean, whatever, for the time being, a legislative majority think it would have meant if they had been entrusted with the making of it. ”

“ Even if it were in the nature of things possible to endow a government with power to prescribe to its subjects the terms upon which to order their social and domestic relations, and to punish them in case of recusancy, every principle which is fundamental in a popular government would insist that such power should be exercised only in conformity with the will of the components of the body politic to be affected by such prescription. ”

“ The practice which they pursue of absorbing all the females of the community, so that none shall be left over for prostitution, demonstrates how utterly they are depraved. The idea which they entertain, that the fraction of a husband with a home, is more wholesome for a woman than neither husband nor home, shows how destitute they are of all the finer feelings of humanity. ”

“ The platform, with its weather-cock out for popular breezes, becomes animated. The press, always on the watch for sensations and circulation, opens out in unwonted wealth of misinformation and verbiage. ”

“ Ecclesiastical bigotry has laid down the rule which unlicensed ruffianism has carried into execution. Domineering superstition, from the pulpit, the platform and the press, sounded the notes of assault; to which outlawry, hungry for plunder and thirsty for anarchy, made haste to respond. Venal authors have been hired to invent slanders to justify the outrages that have been committed. Scores of books have been written, thousands of sermons preached, and millions of newspaper diatribes published, by persons who never saw a Mormon, to prove them the most abandoned of mankind. ”

“ The difference between human happiness and human misery is a momentous difference—a difference as wide as the human mind has the capacity to conceive. The annals of litigation, throughout all the ages, may be searched in vain for another instance in which the alternative between happiness and misery, to so great a multitude of human beings, was immediately involved. ”

“ The defendant was indicted for bigamy; but, as appears throughout from the proceedings, arraigned and tried for polygamy. Thus, on the trial of a person charged with a specific offense—with having, on a certain day, perpetrated an act of bigamy, a juror is put upon oath for an inquiry into his competency, and questioned in respect to his domestic relations. He is asked, "Do you live in polygamy?"—and it appearing to the satisfaction of the court that he does live in polygamy, he is found unfit, and excluded from the panel. ”

“ If the patriarchs of the Mormon community had set them selves deliberately to plan and construct a scheme of social and domestic order, wherein the most flagrant and harmful of the evils and plagues which infest society elsewhere should fail to obtain an entrance, they could not have acted with more wisdom than that by which their work was characterized. Foremost among these evils and plagues are conjugal infidelity and prostitution. Both are characteristic of and inseparable from a state of society founded upon singular marriages. ”

“ It is proof of the wrongfulness of a judgment when its effect is to inflict a great and manifold general injury. The fact that a rule works oppression is proof that it is wrong; proof that on element has been omitted from the analysis, by which the result is depraved. ”

“ That state of society is right in which the social particles are in harmony. The fact of concordant existence is proof absolute of the right to exist. It is evidence that the condition is the expression of the character of the factors; and neither legislature nor judiciary is authorized to infer—what none can safely predict—that the factors would be better disposed if the condition were reconstructed. ”