commanded by George A. Smith, in general charge of the Church emigration that season. Some weeks later a small party of travelers left their wagons in the snow forty miles east of Salt Lake City, and pushed on to the valley, arriving there in a destitute condition.

A movement was now set afoot by the Mormon leaders for the benefit of the poor among their proselytes in the Eastern States and in foreign lands. Hitherto the Church emigration had consisted almost entirely of persons able to pay their own way over sea and land to their new gathering place. There were many, however, too poor to pay, and who had no friends to pay for them. Some of these were scattered through Iowa, Missouri, and up and down the frontier, while othere were to be found among the thirty thousand Saints in the British Isles.

Thus far those who had emigrated from Great Britain, as well as many yet to come from that land, were mostly of the class of whom Charles Dickens, some years later, on visiting a Mormon emigrant ship in the Thames, wrote: "I should have said they were in their degree the pick and flower of England." Dickens meant by this, not only that they were handsome and healthy, but measurably thrifty and prosperous. They were made up of the material generally composing the Mormon emigrant companies, namely: farmers, laborers, mechanics and tradespeople, with a liberal sprinkling of artists, musicians, writers and other professionals, representing the lower and middle classes. But there were many British proselytes who, having little or nothing of this world's wealth, were utterly unable to pay their passage across the Atlantic. It was for the benefit of such that the Mormon leaders, in the fall of 1849, established the since famous Perpetual Emigrating Fund, to which so many in this land owe their deliverance from a state bordering upon pauperism, and their subsequent rise in the financial and social scale.

Those aided by this fund were expected to reimburse it,-paying back into its treasury, as soon as they were able, the amounts expended in their behalf; to be used for the benefit of other poor