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Show NATIONAL ANTI-POLYGAMY PARTY In the course of its comments on the doings of the Prohibition Convention recently held in Chicago, the Butte Miner takes especial notice of the action of the Convention in respect to polygamy. It will be remembered that one grand object of the convention was the taking of preliminary steps looking to the organizing of a National Prohibition party, one of whose fundamental principles should be the abolition of polygamy. In short, prohibition and anti-polygamy were to be the prominent features of the platform of the proposed new party. On this subject, the Miner remarks: How strangely it must strike foreign readers to see that a party is organizing in the United States for the abolition of polygamy. They do not know, as we do, that such an institution exists only in defiance of national law among an ignorant, foreign, obscure sect of irreligious fanatics, whose seclusion in the wilderness has given them hitherto a chance to practice polygamous rites that all parties of all sections abominate. Surely no new party was needed to antagonize this social heresy. The believers in this "social heresy" have long held that they were propagating an innovation that would spread more and more widely, until in time it would become the problem of the age throughout the world, attracting and demanding the attention of the statesmen and legislators of all nations. They have maintained that it is an innovation in which are developed principles that affect and enhance, to an infinite degree, the welfare, happiness and morals of the human family and that it is an embodiment of great truths that have been revealed from heaven and cannot be subverted by all the persecution, ridicule, opprobrium and opposition that may be arrayed against them. The foresighted among the leaders of the innovation have long deemed it not improbable that in time it would become so wide-spread as to occasion the organization or creation of a national party, formed especially to cope with and oppose it, and it would seem that, in the action of the Prohibition Convention at Chicago, there are strong indications that predictions to the effect that "Mormonism" will yet become the pre-eminent national question in the United States will soon be fulfilled. The "Mormons" are not surprised at such proposed opposition; they have long expected it. Not only do they anticipate opposition from political parties, and the coalition of political factions for their overthrow, but they anticipate the alliance of whole nations looking to the same end. Parties may and will be organized to oppose "Mormonism." Legislators may and will enact laws for its suppression; statesmen and politicians may and will oppose it, and the populace of nations may and will cry out against it. But as the slowly dawning sun dissipates the darkness that enshrouds a sleeping world, so will "Mormonism" rescue the human race from a long night of ignorance and superstition, and as well may puny men seek to stay the King of Day in his course towards the zenith as to attempt to check the action of those forces that, by a mandate of Jehovah, have been set in motion for the purification of the earth and its inhabitants, and which are comprised in what is known as "Mormonism." |