ing--in the
Smoot investigation at Washington in 1904--that he did not marry Abraham
Cannon and Lillian Hamlin, that he did not have any conversation with my
father about the marriage, that he did not know Lillian Hamlin had been
betrothed to Abraham's dead brother, that the first time he heard of
the charge that he had married them was when he saw it printed in the
newspapers!

[FOOTNOTE: See Proceedings before Senate Committee on Privileges and
Elections, 1904, Vol. 1, pages 110, 126, 177, etc.]

If this first polygamous marriage had been the last--if it were an
isolated and peculiar incident as the Smiths then claimed it was and
promised it should be--it might be forgiven as generously now as Mr.
Lannan then forgave it. But, about the same time there became public
another case--that of Apostle Teasdale--and as this narrative shall
prove, here was the beginning of a policy of treachery which the
present Church leaders, under Joseph F. Smith, have since consistently
practiced, in defiance of the laws of the state and the "revelation
of God," with lies and evasions, with perjury and its subornation, in
violation of the most solemn pledges to the country, and through the
agency of a political tyranny that makes serious prosecution impossible
and immunity a public boast.

The world understands that polygamy is an enslavement of women. The
ecclesiastical authorities in Utah today have discovered that it is
more powerful as an enslaver of men. Once a man is bound in a polygamous
relation, there is no place for him in the civilized world outside of
a Mormon community. He must remain there, shielded by the Church,
or suffer elsewhere social ostracism and the prosecution of bigamous
relations. Since 1890, the date of the manifesto (and it is to the
period since 1890 that my criticism solely applies) the polygamist must
be abjectly subservient to the prophets who protect him; he must obey
their orders and do their work, or endure the punishment which they can
inflict upon him and his wives and his children. Inveigled into a plural
marriage by the authority of a clandestine religious dogma--encouraged
by his elders, seduced by the prospect of their favor, and impelled
perhaps by a daring impulse to take the covenant and bond that shall
swear him into the dangerous fellowship of the lawlessly faithful--he
finds himself, at once, a law breaker who must pay the Church hierarchy
for his protection by yielding to them every politi