none were asked of me. I was
glad to give my services to a people whom I loved, and trusted, and
admired; and the leaders were as eager to use me as I was eager to be
used in the proper service of my fellows. (Even Joseph F. Smith, in
those days, was glad to give me his "power of attorney" and to trust me
with the care of the community's financial affairs.) But when all the
hierarchy's covenants to the nation were being broken; when the tyranny
of the Prophet's absolutism had been re-established with a fierceness
that I had never seen even in the days of Brigham Young; when polygamy
had been restored in its most offensive aspect, as a breach of the
Church's own revelation; when hopelessly outlawed children were being
born of cohabitation that was clandestine and criminal under the "laws
both of God and of man"--it was impossible for me to be silent either
before the leaders of the Church or in the public places among the
people. I had spoken for the Mormons at a time when few spoke for
them--when many of the men who were now so valiantly loyal to the
hierarchy had been discreetly silent. I had helped defend the Mormon
religion when it had few defenders. I did not propose to criticize it
now; for to me, any sincere belief of the human soul is too sacred to be
so assailed--if not out of respect, surely in pity--and the Mormon faith
was the faith of my parents. But I was determined to make the strongest
assault in my power on the treason and the tyranny which Smith and
his associates in guilt were trying to cover with the sanctities of
religion; and I had to make that assault, as a public man, for a public
purpose, without any consideration of private consequences.

After I began criticizing the Church leaders, in the editorial columns
of the Salt Lake Tribune, my friend Ben Rich, then president of the
Southern States Missions, and J. Golden Kimball, one of the seven
presidents of the seventies, came to me repeatedly to suggest that if
I wished to attack the leaders of the Church I should formally withdraw
from the Church. This I declined to do: because I was in no different
position toward the teachings of the Church than I had been in previous
years--because I was not criticizing the Church or its religious
teachings, but attacking the civil offenses of its leaders as citizens
guilty against the state--and because I saw that my attack had more
power as coming from a man who stood within the community, even though
he had