History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

686 CHURCH AND STATE.
not disputed—but whether it was at liberty to violate
for any purpose the rights guaranteed in the
constitution.
If there be anything sacred in the American constitution,
or in the annals of American jurisprudence,
it is that in criminal prosecutions the accused should
be tried by an impartial, and not by a packed, jury
by men opposed to him through interest or prejudice,
and on whom a religious test is imposed as a qualification.
Under the Poland bill it was ordered that
grand and petit juries should, if possible, be composed
in equal proportions of Mormons and gentiles, or non-
Mormons. The latter included, in 1874, about twentytwo
per cent of the entire population, and as this
measure gave to them the same representation in
juries as was allowed to the remaining seventy-eight
per cent, its injustice is sufficiently apparent. But
under the Edmunds act juries might be composed
entirely of gentiles, thus giving to twenty-two, or at
that date perhaps twenty-five, per cent of the population
the control of the entire criminal proceedings
in Utah, although more than seven eighths of the
arrests made in the territory were among gentile
citizens. 18
Before striving to regenerate the Mormons, it would
seem that congress should have attempted the regeneration
Utah.
of the gentile portion of the population of
At the time when the Edmunds bill was
passed, all the keepers of brothels, and nearly all the
gamesters and saloon-keepers, were gentiles. Two
hundred out of the two hundred and fifty towns
and villages in the territory contained not a single
bagnio. 19
Until gentilec: settled in Salt Lake City
there were seldom heard in its streets or dwellings oaths,
imprecations, or expletives; there were no placehunters
or beggar-politicians; there was no harlotry;
18 For criminal statistics, taken mainly from the census of 1SS0, see p. 394,
this vol.
19 Utah and its People, 21. Of the gamblers 98 per cent were gentiles, and
of the saloon-keepers 94 per cent.
—