ent to rest upon from time to time,
those Senators and Representatives will act by the Mormon
President's orders. "When the lion's hide is too short," said the
Greek, "I piece it out with foxes." And the Mormons, in a day
when the Danites have gone with those who called them into bloody
being, and murder as a Churchly argument is no longer safe,
profit by the Grecian's wisdom.

But the darkest side of Mormonism is seen when one considers the
stamp of moral and mental degradation it sets upon those men and
women who comprise what one might term the peasantry of the
Church. Woman is, as the effect of Mormonism, peculiarly made to
retrograde. Instead of being uplifted she is beaten down. She
must not think; she must not feel; she must not know; she must
not love. Her only safety lies in being blind and deaf and dull
and senseless to every better sentiment of womanhood. She is to
divide a husband with one or two or ten or twenty; she is not to
be a wife, but the fraction of a wife. The moment she looks upon
herself as anything other than a bearer of children she is lost.
Should she rebel - and in her helplessness she does not know how
to enter upon practical revolt - she becomes an outcast; a
creature of no shelter, no food, no friend, no home. Woman is the
basis or, if you will, the source and fountain of a race; woman
is a race's inspiration. And what shall a race be, what shall its
children be, with so lowered and befouled an origin?

At the hearing before the Senate Committee President Smith,
stroking his long white beard in the manner of the patriarchs,
made no secret of his five wives, and seemed to court the Gentile
condemnation. This hardihood was of deliberate plan on the part
of President Smith. He was inviting what he would call "persecution."
He did not fear actual prosecution in the Utah courts; as to the
Federal forums, those tribunals were powerless against him now
that Utah was a State. Being safe in the flesh, President Smith
would bring upon himself and Mormonism the whole fury of the
press. It would serve to quiet schism and bicker within the
Mormon Church. An opposition or a "persecution" would act as a
pressure to bring Mormons together. That pressure would squeeze
out the last drop of political independence among Mormons, which
to the extent that it existed might interfere with his disposal
of the compact Mormon vote. In short, an attack upon himself and
upon Mormonism by the Gentiles would tighten