m. It is, of course, a Latin word, and means "for all"; that
is, the stages were public conveyances for the use of all.]

%323. The Owenite Communities.%--The efforts thus made everywhere and
in every way to increase the comforts and conveniences of mankind turned
the years 1820-1840 into a period of reform. Anything new was eagerly
taken up. When, therefore, a Welshman named Robert Owen came over to
this country, and introduced what he considered a social reform, numbers
of people in the West became his followers. Owen believed that most of
the hardships of life came from the fact that some men secured more
property and made more money than others. He believed that people should
live together in communities in which the farms, the houses, the cattle,
the products of the soil, should be owned not by individual men, but by
the whole community. He held that there should be absolute social
equality, and that no matter what sort of work a man did, whether
skilled or unskilled, it should be considered just as valuable as the
work of any other man.

All this was very alluring, and in a little while Owenite communities
were started in Indiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and New York,
only to end in failure.[2]

[Footnote 2: Noyes's _History of American Socialism._]

%324. The Mormons.%--But there was a social movement started at this
time which still exists. In 1827, at Palmyra, in New York, a young man
named Joseph Smith announced that he had received a new bible from an
angel of the Lord. It was written, he said, on golden plates, which he
claimed to have read by the aid of two wonderful stones; and in 1830 he
gave to the world _The Book of Mormon_.

After the book appeared, Smith and a few others organized a church. Many
at once began to believe in the new religion. But the West seemed so
much better a field that in 1831 Smith and his followers started for
Ohio, and at Kirtland established a Mormon community. There the Mormons
lived for several years, and then went to Missouri, whence they were
expelled, partly because they were an antislavery people. In 1840 they
settled on the banks of the Mississippi in Illinois and built the town
of Nauvoo. At Nauvoo they remained till 1846, when, having adopted
polygamy, they were driven off by the people of Illinois, and, led by
Brigham Young, marched to Council Bluffs, in Iowa. There they stopped to
look about them for a safe place of abode, and finally, in 1847, left
Counci