ndependent of these business concerns, he is in receipt of an income
like unto that which a royal family derives from a national treasury.
One-tenth of all the annual earnings of all the Mormons in all the world
flows to him. These funds amount to the sum of $1,000,000 annually, or 5
per cent upon $32,000,000, which is one-quarter of the entire taxable
wealth of the State of Utah. It is the same as if he owned,
individually, in addition to all his visible enterprises, one-quarter of
all the wealth of the State and derived from it 5 per cent of income
without taxation and without discount. The hopelessness of contending in
a business way with this autocrat must be perfectly apparent to your
minds. The original purpose of this vast tithe, as often stated by
speakers for the church, was the maintenance of the poor, the building
of meetinghouses, etc. To-day the tithes are transmuted, in the
localities where they are paid, into cash, and they flow into the
treasury of the head of the church. No account is made, or ever has been
made, of these tithes. The president expends them according to his own
will and pleasure, and with no examination of his accounts, except by
those few men whom he selects for that purpose and whom he rewards for
their zeal and secrecy. Shortly after the settlement of the Mormon
Church property question with the United States the church issued a
series of bonds, amounting approximately to $1,000,000, which were taken
by financial institutions. This was probably to wipe out a debt which
had accumulated during a long period of controversy with the nation. But
since, and including the year 1897, which was about the time of the
issue of the bonds, approximately $9,000,000 have been paid as tithes.
If any of the bonds are still outstanding, it is manifestly because the
president of the church desires for reasons of his own to have an
existing indebtedness.

It will astound you to know that every dollar of United States money
paid to any servant of the Government who is a Mormon is tithed for the
benefit of this monarch. Out of every $1,000 thus paid he gets $100 to
swell his grandeur. This is also true of money paid out of the public
treasury of the State of Utah to Mormon officials. But what is worst of
all, the monarch dips into the sacred public school fund and extracts
from every Mormon teacher one-tenth of his or her earnings and uses it
for his unaccounted purposes; and, by means of these purposes and