, capable of an heroic fortitude, living by the tenderest
sentiments of fraternity, as gentle as the Quakers, as staunch as the
Jews. I think of them as a man among strangers thinks of the dearness of
his home. I am bound to them in affection by all the ties of life. The
smiles of neighborliness, the greetings of friends, all the familiar
devotion of brothers and sisters, the love of the parents who held me
in their arms by these I know them as my own people, and by these I
love them as a good people, as a strong people, as a people worthy to be
strong and fit to be loved.

But it is even through their virtue and by their very strength that they
are being betrayed. A human devotion--the like of which has rarely
lived among the citizens of any modern state--is being directed as
an instrument of subjugation against others and held as a means of
oppression upon the Mormons themselves. Noble when they were weak,
they are being led to ignoble purpose now that they have become strong.
Praying for justice when they had no power, now that they have gained
power it is being abused to ends of injustice. Their leaders, reaching
for the fleshpots for which these simple-hearted devotees have never
sighed, have allied themselves with all the predaceous "interests" of
the country and now use the superhuman power of a religious tyranny to
increase the dividends of a national plunder.

In the long years of misery when the Mormons of Utah were proscribed and
hunted, because they refused to abandon what was to them, at that, time,
a divine revelation and a confirmed article of faith, I sat many times
in the gallery of the Senate in Washington, and heard discussed new
measures of destruction against these victims of their own fidelity,
and felt the dome above me impending like a brazen weight of national
resentment upon all our heads. When, a few years later, I stood before
the President's desk in the Senate chamber, to take my oath of office
as the representative of the freed people of Utah in the councils of the
nation, I raised my eyes to my old seat of terror in the gallery,
and pledged myself, in that remembrance, never to vote nor speak for
anything but the largest measure of justice that my soul was big enough
to comprehend. By such engagement I write now, bound in a double debt
of obligation to the nation whose magnanimity then saved us and to the
people whom I humbly helped to save.

Frank J. Cannon.

UNDER THE PROPHET IN