MORMON LIBELS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume X, Issue 1092, 27 June 1882, Page 2

MORMON LIBELS.

(From the Auckland Star.) The friends and acquaintances of Mr W. W. Day, formerly Assistant Clerk at tho Corporation officers, Auckland, but now a saint at Utah, will be interested to learn that he has comfortably settled down in the terrestrial Zion, and that he fills an office in connection with the leading Co-operative store of the place. He has been grievously exercised in spirit over the defamatory and highly exaggerated reports which returning evangelists from these colonies bring with them concerning our social state and moral condition. In a communication dated May 1, which we received from him by the last mail, he thus gives expression to his justly indignant feelings :—“ It astonishes me sometimes to hear the monstr</us untruths that elders will bring back respecting the landsand people where they have been performing missionary labour. As an example of this, I may say that an Elder very recently returned from New Zealand, whilst in conversation with me, stated that the islands were so full of wickedness and iniquity of every description that he could actually smell it whilst walking along the street, and concluded by affirming that there was not a virtuous woman in the land. It is needless for me to inform you that I immediately and vigorously denied this vilely false statement, nor can I to this day understand how it is that a Mormon Elder, who has access to comparatively so exceedingly few families, can build up an opinion even of such a character as that expressed by the man in question. In fact, there is only one reasonable way of interpreting such a statement that I am aware of. Suppose, for example, that I was sent on a mission to any land, and that my labours were confined amongst a certain class of ladies whose fto use a term in whist playing) honours were easy, why then I should naturally form an opinion from my surrounding, but if my associates were of good moral character and capable of refined ideas, it would be impossible for me to stigmatise them with slanderous reports and yet profess to fo bo a follower of the God of Truth. I have lived for twenty-four years amongst almost all classes of New Zealand’s daughters, and I can safely say that they more than compare in virtue with those of any other people in other lands that I have resided in or read about, and even then be able to allow a large margin for probabilities ; and yet an Elder of some few months’ sojourn in the land can afford to traduce a people whom he never knew. It is such wretched statements as these that draw down upon the heads of the better class of missionaries the persecutions so much complained of by Latter Day Saints; and in my humble opinion, in many cases it simply follows as the “ night the day,” or as a punishment for an infringement of a law. I believe you have a real good man in Elder Wm. Bromley, who is in charge of the New Zealand mission. He bears a fine character from all who know him; and from my own personal acquaintance I can testify that he is as straight a man as most mem”