she not
only marked the child as illegitimate beyond the relief of any future
statutes--legitimizing the offspring of polygamous marriages, but she
left herself and the child without any claim upon the estate of its
father and publicly swore herself a social outcast before a committee of
the United States Senate, and perjured herself--to the knowledge of all
her friends and acquaintances in Utah--for the protection of her husband
and her Church. What can one say of a man who will permit a woman to
commit such an act of social suicide for him--or of a Church that will
command it?

Here is a condition of society unparalleled anywhere else in
civilization--unparalleled even in barbarous countries, for wherever
else polygamy is practiced it at least has the sanction of local
convention. And the consequent suffering that falls upon the women and
the children is a heart-break to see. During the days when I was in the
editorial office of the Salt Lake Tribune, scores of miserable cases
came to my knowledge by letter, by the report of friends, and by the
visits of the agonized wives themselves. I shall never forget one young
woman, in her twenties, who came to ask my help in forcing her husband
to obtain a marriage certificate for her from the Church, so that her
boy might have the right to claim a father. She wept, with her head
on my desk, sobbing out her story, and appealing to me for aid with a
convulsed and tear-drenched face.

Four years earlier, she had become friendly with a man twice her age,
whom she admired and respected. He had taken two wives before the
manifesto of 1890, but that did not prevent him from coveting the youth
and beauty of this young woman. He first approached her mother for
permission to marry the girl, and when the mother-who was herself a
plural wife replied that it was impossible under the law, he brought an
apostle to persuade her that the practice of plural marriage was
still as meet, just and available to salvation as it had been when she
married. Then he went to the daughter.

"I was terrified," she said, "when he proposed to me. And yet--he asked
me if I thought my mother had done wrong when she married my father....
There was no one else I liked as much. He was good. He was rich. He
told me I'd never want for anything. He said I would be fulfilling the
command of God against the wickedness of a persecuting world.... I don't
know what devil of fanaticism entered into me. I thought it wou