representative of Omnipotence, whose duty it was to see that all had the
rights to which he thought them entitled, and assuming that a woman's
chief right was that of wifehood and maternity, he had instituted the
practice of plural marriage, as a "Prophet of God," on the authority of
a direct revelation from the Almighty. It was upon this rock that the
whole enterprise, the whole experiment in religious communism, now
threatened to split. Not that polygamy was so large an incident in the
life of the community--for only a small proportion of the Mormons were
living in plural marriage. And not that this practice was the cardinal
sin of Mormonism--for among intelligent men, then as now, the great
objection to the Church was its assumption of a divine authority to hold
the "temporal power," to dictate in politics, to command action and
to acquit of responsibility. But polygamy was the offense against
civilization which the opponents of Mormonism could always cite in
order to direct against the Church the concentrated antagonism of the
governments of the Western world. And my father, in authorizing me to
proceed to Washington as a sort of ambassador of the Church, evidently
wished to impress upon me the larger importance of the value of the
social experiment which the Mormons had, to this time, so successfully
advanced.

"It would be a cruel waste of human effort," he said, "if, after having
attained comfort in these valleys--established our schools of art and
science--developed our country and founded our industries--we should now
be destroyed as a community, and the value of our experience lost to the
world. We have a right to survive. We have a duty to survive. It would
be to the profit of the nation that we should survive."

But in order to survive, it was necessary to obtain some immediate
mitigation of the enforcement of the laws against us. The manner in
which they were being enforced was making compromise impossible, and
the men who administered them stood in the way of getting a favorable
hearing from the powers of government that alone could authorize a
compromise. It was necessary to break this circle; and my father went
over the names of the men in Washington who might help us. I could
marvel at his understanding of these men and their motives, but we came
to no plan of action until I spoke of what had been with me a sort of
forlorn hope that I might appeal to President Cleveland himself.

My father said thou