oor for us, now, to power and wealth
and all the comfort and consideration that would come of these. Other
men better than I in personal character, more experienced in legislation
than I, and wiser by natural gift, were willing to vote for the bill;
and Bishop Cutler, a man whom I had always esteemed, the representative
of the men whom I most revered, had urged me, for them, to support the
bill, under suggestion of their anger if I refused to be guided by their
leadership.

I saw why the "interests" were eager to have our friendship; we could
give them more than any other community of our size in the whole
country. In the final analysis, the laws of our state and the
administration of its government would be in the hands of the church
authorities. Moses Thatcher might lead a rebellion for a time, but it
would be brief. Brigham H. Roberts might avow his independence in some
wonderful burst of campaign oratory, but he would be forced to fast and
pray and see visions until he yielded. I might rebel and be successful
for a moment, but the inexorable power of church control would crush me
at last. Yet, if I surrendered in this matter of the tariff, I should
be doing exactly what I had criticized so many of my colleagues for
doing--for more than one man in the House and the Senate had given me
the specious excuse that it was necessary to go against his conscience,
here, in order to hold his influence and his power to do good in other
instances.

I did not sleep that night. On the day following, I transacted the
financial affairs that I had been asked to undertake, and then I
returned to Washington. My wife met me at the railway station, and--if
you will bear with the intimacy of such psychology--the moment I saw
her I knew how I would vote. I knew that neither the plea of community
ambition, nor the equally invalid argument of an industrial need at
home, nor the financial jeopardy of my friends who had invested in our
home industries, nor the fear of church antagonism, could justify me in
what would be, for me, an act of perfidy. When I had taken my oath of
office I had pledged myself, in the memory of old days of injustice,
never to vote as a Senator for an act of injustice. The test had come.
By all the sanctities of that old suffering and the promise that I had
made in its spirit, I would keep the faith.

When the tariff bill came to its final vote in the Senate, I had the
unhappy distinction of being the only Republica