power fatal to
their liberties. It was confirmed to a man who proved himself eager for
it, ambitious to increase it and secretly unscrupulous in his use of
it. He proceeded at once to preach the doctrine of contribution with
unexampled zeal, but he administered the "common fund," so collected,
with none of the old feeling of responsibility to the people who
contributed it He became the first of the new financial pontiffs of
the Church who have used the "money power" as an aid to hierarchical
domination.

Moreover, in his desire to fill the coffers of the Church, he engaged in
"practical politics" and made a profit out of Church influence, both
in business enterprises and in political campaigns. He proved himself
peculiarly qualified by nature to construct and direct a secret
political machine--a machine whose operations were never to be
observable except to the close student of Utah's ecclesiasticism--a
machine that was to be all the more effective because of its silent
certainty. As the succeeding chapters of this narrative will show,
although he affected a fine superiority to unclean political work and
always publicly professed that the Church of Christ was holding itself
aloof from the strife of partisanship, there was no political event on
which he did not fix the calculating eye of his ambitious clericalism
and no candidacy that he did not reach with those slender but powerful
fingers that controlled the destiny of a state and trifled with the
honor of a people.

His accession marked the change from the old to the new regime in Utah.
Leadership was no longer a dangerous honor. Proscription no longer made
the authorities of the Church strong by persecution--hardy chiefs of a
poverty-stricken people--leaders as sensible of the obligations of power
as their followers were faithful in their allegiance of duty. Political
freedom and worldly prosperity made the office of President a luxurious
sovereignty, easily tyrannical, fortified in its religious absolutism by
its irresponsible power of finance, and protected in its social abuses,
from the interference of the nation, by an alliance with the commercial
rulers of the nation and by a duplicity that worldliness has learned to
dignify with the respectability of material success.

Chapter X. On the Downward Path

During the last years of President Woodruff's life there had been a slow
decline of the feeling that it was necessary for self-protection that
the hi