antage of the mercy, by
refusing the expressly implied pledge.

Meanwhile the campaign had been continued for the return of the
escheated Church property and for the passage of an Enabling Act that
should permit the territory to organize for statehood.

[FOOTNOTE: Statehood seemed still very faraway. There was a
Trans-Mississippi Congress held at Ogden in 1892, and though the
delegates--coming from all the states and territories "west of the
river," were the guests of the people of Utah, so hopeless was our
status in the consideration of mankind that the delegates from the
territories of New Mexico and Arizona would not let our names be joined
to theirs in a resolution for statehood which we wished the committee
on resolutions to propose to the Congress. Governor Prince of New Mexico
replied, to our plea for a share in the resolution, that he did not
intend to damn New Mexico by having her mixed up with Utah. We appealed
to the Congress, and we were saved by a speech made by Thos. M.
Patterson of Colorado, subsequently senator from Colorado, who carried
the day for us. At a recent Trans-Mississippi Congress held in Denver,
I sat with ex-Senator Patterson to hear Mr. Prince still proposing
resolutions in support of statehood for New Mexico. Twenty years later!]
Joseph L. Rawlins, Democratic delegate from Utah, worked valiantly among
the Democrats, and he was assisted by the influence of Mr. Franklin S.
Richards and John T. Caine and others among their old associates in that
party. But, in the very midst of the fight, we were advised that,
unless the Republican leaders would let the Enabling Act go through, the
Democratic leaders would falter in our advocacy.

I had been urged to go to Washington by the Presidency to do what I
might to allay Republican antagonism, and I found that a number of
self-appointed lobbyists (who expected political preferment's and other
rewards from the Church in the event of statehood) had been using the
most amazing arguments in our behalf. For example, they told some of
the "financial Senators" that the Church had fourteen million dollars in
secret funds with which to help build a railroad to the coast as soon
as statehood should be granted. They cited the number of the Church's
adherents in all the states and territories of the Pacific Coast and as
far east as Iowa and Missouri, and predicted that the gratitude of these
people to the Republicans who were helping to free Utah would enable t