he
Republican party to control a balance of political power in the several
states. They declared positively that plural marriages and plural
marriage living had utterly ceased among the Mormons for all time. And
they made such statements with great particularity to Senator Orville H.
Platt, of Connecticut, who was too wise a man to credit them.

As soon as I returned to Washington, he summoned me to a private
meeting, in his parlor in the Arlington Hotel, and confronted me with
one of the Republican lobbyists who had been soliciting his personal
favor and his almost controlling influence. "Now, Mr. Cannon," he said,
in his dry way, "have the Mormons stopped living with their plural
wives? And will there never be another case of plural marriage among
them?"

I remembered the lesson of my interview with him at the time of the
campaign against the disfranchisement bill, and I answered: "No. Not
all the men of the Church have complied fully with the law. So far as
I know, all the general authorities of the Church--with two or three
exceptions--are fulfilling the covenant they gave; and so far as I can
judge there will never be another plural marriage ceremony with the
consent or connivance of the leaders of the Church. But human nature is
very much the same in Utah as it is in Connecticut. Here and there, no
doubt, a man feels that he's under an obligation to keep his covenant
with his plural wives in preference to the covenant of his accepted
amnesty; and there and here, possibly, in the future, some man will
break the law and defy the orders of the Church and take a plural wife.
But the leaders of the Church do not countenance either proceeding, and
any man who violates the law, in either respect, offends against the
revelations of the Church and, I believe, will be dealt with as an
apostate. I come direct from the Presidency of the Church, and I am
authorized to pledge their word of honor that they will themselves obey
the law and do all in their power as men and leaders to bring their
people into harmony with the institutions of this country as rapidly as
possible."

Senator Platt had slowly unwrapped himself, rising from his chair to his
full height of more than six feet, in a lank and alarming indignation.
"There," he said, striding up and down the room. "That's it! That's just
it. These people have been telling us that you were obeying the law--all
of you--in every instance--and would always obey it. And now you c