assurances of support for
his candidacies and his policies. It would have required a man of the
calmest discrimination and coolest judgment to find the line between
any just claim for mercy presented by the Mormon advocates of "religious
liberty" and the willful offenses which they were committing against the
national integrity.

I have received it personally, from the lips of more than one member
of the Senate committee, that never in all their experience with public
questions was such executive pressure brought to bear upon them as was
urged from the White House, at this time, for the protection of Apostle
Smoot's seat in the Senate. The President's most intimate friends on the
committee voted with the minority to seat Smoot. One of the President's
closest adherents, Senator Dolliver, after having signed a majority
report to exclude Smoot and having been re-elected, in the meantime,
by his own State legislature, to another term in the Senate--afterwards
spoke and voted against the report which he had signed. Senator A. J.
Hopkins of Illinois, who had supported Smoot consistently, found himself
bitterly attacked, in his campaign for reelection, because of his
record in the Smoot case, and he published in his defense a letter from
President Roosevelt that read: "Just a line to congratulate you upon the
Smoot case. It is not my business, but it is a pleasure to see a public
servant show, under trying circumstances, the courage, ability and sense
of right that you have shown."

After the outrageous exposures of the violations of law, the treason
and the criminal indifference to human rights shown by the rulers of
the Church, if an early vote had been taken by the committee and by
the Senate itself, the antagonism of the nation would have forced the
exclusion of the Apostle from the upper House. Delay was his salvation.
More to the President's influence than to any other cause is the delay
attributable that prolonged the case through a term of three years.
During that time the unfortunate Gentiles of Utah learned that, instead
of receiving help from the President, they were to have only the most
insuperable opposition. They believed that the President was being
grossly misled; that it was, of course, impossible for him to read all
the testimony given before the Senate committee, and that the matters
that reached him were being tinged with other purpose than the
vindication of truth and justice. But it was impossible to o