o hold a local
adherency; but hundreds of Mormons, who still vote the American city
ticket, vote for the Church in state elections, because, though they
want reform, they are not willing to risk the punishment of their
relatives and the leaders of the Church to attain that reform. And
when the national government granted its patent of approval to the
hierarchy--by holding the hierarchy's appointed representative in
the Senate as its prophetic monitor--nearly all the people of the
intermountain country lost heart in the fight. Thousands of Gentiles,
who knew the truth and had fought for it for years, argued despairingly:
"If the nation likes this sort of thing--I guess it's the sort of thing
it likes. I'm not going to ruin myself financially and politically by
keeping up a losing struggle with these neighbors of mine, and fight
the government at Washington besides. If the administration wants to be
bossed by the Prophet, Seer and Revelator, I can stand it."

The nation, having accepted responsibility for past polygamy, now,
by accepting Senator Smoot, gave its responsible approval to the new
polygamy and to the commercial and political tyrannies of the Church.
In the old days the Mormons had claimed immunity for their practice
of polygamy on the ground that the constitution of the United States
protected them in the exercises of their faith. The Supreme Court of the
country determined that the free-religion clause of the constitution did
not cover violations of law; and the Church deliberately abandoned its
claim of religious immunity. But now a majority of the Senate, supported
by President Roosevelt, took the old ground--which the Supreme Court had
made untenable and the Mormons themselves had vacated--and practically
declared that violations of law were a part of the constitutional
guaranty!

Chapter XVI. The Price of Protest

The members of the Mormon hierarchy continually boast that they are
sustained in their power--and in their abuses of that power--"by the
free vote of the freest people under the sun." By an amazing self
deception the Mormon people assume that their government is one of
"common consent;" and nothing angers them more than the expression of
any suspicion that they are not the freest community in the world. They
live under an absolutism. They have no more right of judgment than a
dead body. Yet the diffusion of authority is so clever that nearly every
man seems to share in its opera