ed the financial
absolutism of the Mormon Prophet, which Smith was establishing in
partnership with "the Plunderbund." He was finally excommunicated and
ostracized, by his father's successors in power, for championing the
political and social liberties of the Mormon people whom he had helped
to save from destruction and whose statehood sovereignty he had so
largely obtained.

When the partnership of the Church and "the Interests" prevented the
expulsion of Apostle Smoot from the Senate, Senator Cannon withdrew from
Utah, convinced that nothing could be done for the Mormons so long as
the national administration sustained the sovereignty of the Mormon
kingdom as a co-ordinate power in this Republic. For the last few years
he has been a newspaper editor in Denver, Colorado--on the Denver Times
and the Rocky Mountain News--helping the reform movement in Colorado
against the corporation control of that state, and waiting for the
opportunity to renew his long fight for the Mormon people.

In the following narrative he returns to that fight. In fulfillment of
a promise made before he left Utah--and seeing now, in the new
"insurgency," the hope of freeing Utah from slavery to "the System"--he
here addresses himself to the task of exposing the treasons and
tyrannies of the Mormon Prophet and the consequent miseries among his
people.

In the course of his exposition, he gives a most remarkable picture
of the Mormon people, patient, meek, and virtuous, "as gentle as the
Quakers, as staunch as the Jews." He introduces the world for the first
time to the conclaves of the Mormon ecclesiasts, explains the simplicity
of some of them, the bitterness of others, the sincerity of almost
all--illuminating the dark places of Church control with the
understanding of a sympathetic experience, and bringing out the virtues
of the Mormon system as impartially as he exposes its faults. He traces
the degradation of its communism, step by step and incident by incident,
from its success as a sort of religious socialism administered for the
common good to its present failure as a hierarchical capitalism governed
for the benefit of its modern "Prophet of Mammon" at the expense of the
liberty, the happiness, and even the prosperity, of its victims.

For the first time in the history of the Mormon Church, there has
arrived a man who has the knowledge and the inclination to explain it.

He does this fearlessly, as a duty, and without any apologies,