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Show WHAT COULD BE DONE. That Salt Lake is bound to be a great city, all thoughtful men who measure its surroundings, and who reason from cause to inevitable effect, admit. But the progress that is imminent now can be retarded'. It would be idle to deny that there is much heartburning, much distrust and a good deal of estrangement among the people here. It could all be settled in one day by one man. Joseph F. Smith, president of the Mormon church, tells eastern correspondents in effect that the Mormon church does not interfere in politics. Under the name of the church we suspect that is true. But the units that make up the governing board of the church, in their individual capacity do interfere in politics, and the trouble is that their special influence is ecclesiastical influence. Without With-out naming the church they carry into politics all the influence that the church can wield. John Doe or Richard Roe may be but individuals individ-uals who, so far as their judgment or their wisdom wis-dom has ever been revealed, are ordinary men only, but if attached to them is the title of apostle, -then tens of thousands of voters in Utah, cowed by i. iHfl a superstitious fear, are bound to do what the ll apostle directs or advises, so that in that relation H the two words are synonymous. B We saw a striking example of this a year ago. H Left to the Republicans of the state Governor H Wells would have been renominated almost by ac jH clamation. But we have it from excellent au- H thority that when Apostle Smoot returned from H Washington last spring, he called upon Governor H Wells and informed him that he must not be a sH candidate because another man had been selected jH for the place. In the same way Mr. Callister was ordered out of the race. Gov. Wells knowing his position decided that he would try for the place, with the result that he was defeated by a few votes. If he had secured more delegates in the 1 convention, he would have been defeated just the H same, if necessary every Mormon in that con- vention that was pledged to him, would have voted against him. This state of affairs is intolerable in a free re- ' public where the only defense short of the sword IH rests in a free ballot. H Well, Joseph F. Smith can remove this cloud :H from Utah in ten minutes next Sunday morning H in the tabernacle if he pleases to, and, indeed, he jH ought to be, if he loves the constitution and H laws of the United States as much as he pro- H fesses to. jH All that is required is for him, from before the H tabernacle altars, to declare that henceforth this jH Mormon people shall be politically free, to think H as they please and to vote as they please, and WM that if any voter is approached by any officer of WM the church with advice how to vote, to treat him 'M H H& merely as a neighbor and citizen, giving him no Hj heed as an officer of the church. Hj- That would make an American state of Utah Hr in five minutes, and on the president's part it M would be only making good the pledges he made m when statehood was sought for. M Without it the present conditions will continue H until party lines are again broken down and there BH will be only a Mormon and an anti-Mormon H party. H When that times comes there will be no state Hj officer who is not a Mormon, no city officer in Hjj any of the main towns of the state who will not HE be a Gentile, and that situation will take Utah out H of the realm of American states. Hj It is history that Mohammed died in the arms Hn of his concubine Ayesha. In his last hours the B devoted woman said to him: H "O prophet, will none enter Paradise except by B the mercy of Allah?" H And his answer was: No, no. None enter Hi but by the favor of Allah." B "But you, O prophet, will you not enter Para- HL dise except by the compassion of Allah?" L Whereupon the prophet placed his hand upon 1 his heart and thrice solemnly said: "I shall not B enter except Allah cover me with his mercy." V On another occasion he said: "I am no more B than a man; when I order you anything respecting B! religion, receive it, when I order you about the Htl business of this life, then I am nothing more than Hf a man." Kf j Is Joseph Smith greater than was Mohammed? H WHAT PROGRESS DEMANDS. H The Minnesota, one of Jim Hill's new ships, car- Hj ried 26,000 tons of freight to Japan and then re- Hi turned to Seattle in less than fourteen days, the B quickest trip ever made from the Orient to our Hg west coast.. And the Minnesota has always been Hp described as a freight boat, not intended for fast 1 sailing. H It only shows how short a ferry even the great H Pacific has become how near we are to where Hr half this old world's workers are hived in west- Hr ern Asia.. By the time the Russo-Japanese war is HT closed that hive will be swarming. HBj It will be chiefly under direction of Japan. B ( We have all seen what she can do in war. No nation has superior military and naval officers; no men can handle arms or ships better than the Japanese; our medical men who have seen the Japanese medical organizations for seeing to the sick and wounded declare that in its perfectness it could not be duplicated by any western power. We take it that the Japanese, like the Chinese, are not an inventive people, but, unlike the Chinese, they have the discernment to eliminate what is useless in a machine or a formula, to adopt all that is good and to reject all that is defective. Well, when the war closes, that nation will turn to the arts of peace, the best machinery in the world will be procured and duplicated in native factories and then the nations like Great Britain, France and Germany, that obtain their profits from their manufacturies, will have trade problems prob-lems as difficult to solve as Russia has found the military problems with which she has been confronted, con-fronted, for those myriads in the Oriental hive that work for a sum on which a Caucasian cannot live, will produce the wares that Japanese merchants mer-chants in Japanese ships will offer to the world. How will the competition be met? A dispatch said the other day that the Boston Technical school and School of Design was about to be removed and attached to Columbia university, uni-versity, and it was hoped to make it equal to the great French school of the same kind. That is a hopeful sign, for it will compel the other great universities to adopt the same course, with the result that more American brain will be fused with American manufactured goods, as is now done by the French and Germans. Material that, in its raw state, is almost worthless, will, through a chemical change wrought by American brain, be transformed and become a work of art that the irch will be glad to exchange their gold for. And more and more of the young men and women of the United States will be found anxious to acquire the knowledge to make those transformations. But in view of the hosts that are swarming to our shores from Europe, and the working changes that are imminent in Asia, we cannot help but think that a diversion ought to be made to begin the peaceable conquest of South America, even as Great Britain is carving out a new empire from Cairo to the Cape in Africa, a region where her surplus thousands may go and found new homes U and new states for years and years to come. That the locomotive is the most effective pio. neer ever sent forward to subdue a wilderness, and to draw immigration after it, Great Britain learned from the United States. Great Britain tried to go to the relief of Gordon and made a miserable failure, nearly losing a superb army in the desert between two bends of the Nile. . We be-lieve be-lieve it was a suggestion made in this city that caused the war authorities in London to order the locomotive to be pushed ahead of Kitchener's advance ad-vance upon the Soudan. It took him several years to make the march, but the final triumph, almost without loss, made clear the wisdom of the plan. Well, one American railway company has spent in construction as much as would be needed to start a road from the Carrjbean sea, skirt the Andes as far as Bolivia and turn thence to Rio and Buenos Ayres.. It would not be much for a few of our railroad kings to combine and do, and then there would be a second southern continent open to the millions who want homes. |
