of the hierarchy
or its favorites, at the community's expense!

The Utah Light and Railway Company (Joseph F. Smith, president), which
was supported by the tithes of the Mormon people, was charging $1.25 per
thousand cubic feet for fuel gas and $1.75 for illuminating gas, just
before the company was sold to the "Harriman interests." (The Supreme
Court of the United States has fixed a rate of 80 cents a thousand as
a fair price for gas in New York City.) The Salt Lake Street Railway
(operating under a fifty-year franchise, obtained from the City Council
by, the power of the Church while Joseph F. Smith was president of the
company) charges a five-cent fare, gives but one transfer, allows no
half fares for children, and pays the city nothing for the use of its
streets. Before the transfer of the Church's sugar stocks to the trust,
the sugar factories paid the farmer $4.50 a ton for his beets and sold
him sugar for $4.50 a hundred pounds; today beets are bought for $4.50
a ton, and sugar sold at $6.00 a hundred. The price asked for salt in
Utah, where it should be "dirt cheap," is the same as everywhere under
the salt trust. And so on--through the rest of the list.

To maintain this system of sanctified gain Joseph F. Smith invokes all
the power of his "divine" authority as "the mouthpiece of the Lord." He
protects the sugar trust by preventing the establishment of independent
sugar factories (as for example in Sanpete and Sevier counties in 1905),
just as he protects the salt trust by preventing the competition of
independent salt gardens (as in the case of Smurthwaite and Taylor.) He
issues his edict of protection as "the vicegerent of God on Earth" to
the Mormons; and he excommunicates and ostracizes, in this world and the
next, the Mormon protestant who dares rebel against commercial monopoly.

He receives between two and three million dollars a year in tithes,
gives no accounting of them, and has no responsibility for them, except
to God and his own conscience. He is able to use this sum, in bulk,
at any given point, with a weight of financial pressure that would
overbalance any other such single power in the community. As "trustee in
trust" for the Church, he has the added income from stocks and previous
investments; and he has practical control of the wealth of all the
leading men of the Church to assist him, if he should call upon them
for assistance. He uses his financial dictatorship to support monopoly
agains