| Show SWEEPING CHARGES For weeks the organ of the Rising Storm has been proclaiming to th J world that Utah is a land of defiant lawbreakers law-breakers and pledgebreakers These irrational and manifestly malicious ma-licious statements are not borne out by the facts In no state of the Union havft merchants and business men better bet-ter credit Kowhere are the > people so prompt jn paying their obligations Their word is their bond And eastern i capitalists So record it I In creatinz its storm of adverse sentiment sen-timent the organ has given out the im liression that the people of Utah are a lawless and immoral set < Nothing could be farther from the truth Aside from a single institution I which d rida a half century of religious reli-gious sanction obtained a foothold that no reasonable man ever believed I could be shaken loose at once the people I peo-ple of Utah those of the dominant church are upright moral selfre specling peaceloving and lawabiding That the old relations would run their course that men would continued to be men and that human nature would not change in a decade or ven in two was I an admission that common sense and practical observation has made at I least up to the recent state campaign All through that contest and frequently fre-quently since its close the organ whose mission seems to be the starting of storms of prejudice and the spreading where it is most likely to injure the people and the tate declared that plural marriages are still being contracted con-tracted in the Mormon church in spite of their prohibition by the manifesto and the oftrepeated deniajs of the church authorities When asked for the proof of this serious se-rious charge one is always put aside with the petulant remark We know it is so and that is enough Yesterday it reiterated the unsupported unsup-ported assertion with which it has caused most of the illfeeling and hostility hos-tility in the east which it likens to arising a-rising storm It said As the days and weeks go by other facts are developing There have been against the plighted faith of the dominant church and the Mormon people peo-ple other polygamous marriages or other celestial Healings or some ceremony cere-mony which results in this world the same as polygamous marriages result re-sult Formerly President Snow was ex ceptod from its sweeping declarations of Mormon insincerity duplicity and Invnorality But the other day it insinuated in-sinuated that there are evidences of his douledealing with the government similar to those it has caricatured for campaign purposes The people of the state are entitled to fair treatment If the organ has proofs ot plural marriages contracted since statehood it should trot them out If the proofs are not available it shouid mention names at least The general charge it makes includes every I mewiber of the dominant church ItI calls upon them ta suppress the practice prac-tice and yet it falsely accuses them of continuing it If the contracting of plural marriages is followed today at all which we doubt even the organ will not pretend that every churdh member is entering into such contracts But the organ neither gives the innocent inno-cent a charfce to establish their own Innocence or to rebuke the guilty Its whole course is so unfair and so tainted with vindictiveness that the injury of the state in order to injure a sect seems to be the only obje t of the stormstarter unless of course there was a secondary design to create fa clamorous demand for a stormstopper |
