than two hundred "new" polygamists
with the dates and circumstances of their marriages; and these are
probably not one tenth of all the cases. During President Taft's
visit to Salt Lake City, in 1909, Senator Thomas Kearns, one of the
proprietors of the Tribune, offered to prove to one of the President's
confidants hundreds of cases of new polygamy, if the President would
designate two secret service men to investigate. I believe, from my own
observation, that there are more plural wives among the Mormons today
than there were before 1890. Then the young men married early, and were
chiefly monogamists. Now the change in economic conditions has raised
the age at which men marry; it has made more bachelors than there were
when simpler modes of life prevailed. The young women have fewer offers
of marriage, and more of these come from well-to-do polygamists. The
girls are still taught, as they have always been, that marriage is
necessary to salvation; and they are betrayed into plural marriage by
natural conditions as well as by the persuasions of the Church.

A perfect "underground" system has been put in operation for the
protection of the lawbreakers. If they reside in Utah, they frequently
go to Canada or to Mexico to be married; and the whole polygamous
paraphernalia can be transported with ease and comfort--the priest who
performs the ceremony, the husband, sometimes the legal wife to give her
consent so that she may not be damned, and the young woman whose soul is
to be saved. And this "underground" is maintained against the reluctance
of the Mormon people. They aid in it from a kindly feeling toward
their fellow-believers--and with some faint thought that perhaps these
wayfarers are being "persecuted" but all the time with no personal
sympathy for polygamy. By one sincere word of reprehension from Joseph
F. Smith every "underground" station could be abolished, the route could
be destroyed, and an end could be put to the protection that is, of
itself, an encouragement to polygamous practice. He has never spoken
that word.

Recently, the way in which the new polygamy is perpetrated in Utah has
been almost officially revealed. A patriarch of the Church, resident
in Davis County, less than fifteen miles from Salt Lake City, had been
solemnizing these unlawful unions at wholesale. The situation became so
notorious that the authorities of the Church felt themselves impelled
about September, 1910, to put restrictions upo