nd of fellowship to Joseph, the tyrant of
the Kingdom. He rebuked our friends and his own, in their struggle
for our freedom, by warning them that they were raising the flag of a
religious warfare. He filled the Mormon priests with the belief that
they might proceed unrestrainedly to the sacrifice of women and children
upon the polygamous altar, to the absolute rule of politics in the
intermountain states, and to the commercial exploitation of their
community in partnership with the trusts. The one policy that President
Taft seems to have accepted unimpaired from his predecessor is this
same respect for the power of the Mormon kingdom. In his placid but
wholehearted way he has encouraged his co-ordinate ruler, the Mormon
Prophet, and extended the Executive license to the support and
inevitable increase of these religious tyrannies of the Mormon hierarchs
which now the people of Utah, unaided, are wholly unable to combat.

And the nation owes such a rectification not only to Utah, but also to
itself. The commercial and financial Plunderbund that is now preying
upon the whole country is sustained at Washington by the agents of the
Mormon Church. The Prophet not only delivers his own subjects up to
pillage; he helps to deliver the people of the entire United States.
His senators are not representatives of a political party; they are the
tools of "the Interests" that are his partners. The shameful conditions
in Utah are not isolated and peculiar to that state; they are largely
the result of national conditions and they have a national effect. The
Prophet of Utah is not a local despot only: he is a national enemy; and
the nation must deal with him.

I do not ask for a resumption of cruelty, for a return to proscription.
I ask only that the nation shall rouse itself to a sense of its
responsibility. The Mormon Church has shown its ability to conform to
the demands of the republic--even by "revelation from God" if necessary.
The leaders of the Church are now defiant in their treasons only because
the nation has ceased to reprove and the national administrations have
powerfully encouraged. As soon as the Mormon hierarchy discovers that
the people of this country, wearied of violated treaties and broken
covenants, are about to exclude the political agents of the Prophet from
any participation in national affairs, the advisers of his inspiration
will quickly persuade him to make a concession to popular wrath. As soon
as the "Int