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Show of all civil rights. All polygamists had been disfranchised by the bill of 1882, and all the vcmcn of Utah by the bill of 1S87. "I did not then believe, and I do not now, that the practice of polygamy was a thing which the American nation could condone. 2ut I knew that our people believed in it as a practice ordained, by a revelation from God, for the salvation of the world. It was to them an article of faith as sacred as any for which the martyrs of any religion ever died; aDd it seemed that the nation in its resolve to vindicate the supremacy of the government, was determined to put them to the point of martyrdom. "It was vith this prospect before us that we drove that night up the Salt Lake valley, across a corner of the desert, to the little town of Bountiful; and as soon as we arrived among the houses of the settlement, a man stepped out into the road from the shadows and stopped us. Wilcken spoke to him. He recognized us, and let us pass. "As we turned into the farm where my father was concealed, I saw men looking here and there, on guard, about the grounds. The house was an old fashioned adobe farmhouse; the windows were all dark; we entered through the kitchen. And I entered, let me say, with the sense that I was about to come before one of the most able among men. "To those who knew George Q. Cannon I do not need to justify that feeling. .He was the man upon whose sagacity the fate of tho Mormons at that moment depended. He was the first counsellor of the church, and had been so for years. For ten years in congress he had fought and defeated the proscriptive legislation that had been attempted against his people; and Senator Koar had said of him: 'No man in congress ever served a territory more ably.' "When I entered the low-ceilinged, lamp-lit room in which he sat, he rose to meet me, and all rose with him like a court. He embraced em-braced me without effusion, looking at me silently with his wise blue eyes that always seemed to read in my face whatever I had become in my absence from his regard. "He talked a few minutes, affectionately, about family matters, and then straightening his shoulders to the burden of more gravity he said: "I have sent for you, my son. to see if you cannot find some way to help us in our difficulties. I have made it a matter of prayer, and I have been led to urge you to activity. You have never performed a mission for the church, and I have sometimes wondered if you cared anything about your religion. " 'You have never obeyed the celestial covenant, and you have kept yourself aloof from the duties of the priesthood, but it may have been a providential overruling. I have talked with some of the brethren, and we feel that if relief does not soon appear our community com-munity will be scattered and the great work crushed. The Lord can hS5' us' but we must put forth our own efforts- Can yu sce anv I replied that I had already been in Washington twice on my own initiative, conferring with some of his congressional friends. 'I am still I said, 'of the opinion I expressed to you and President laylor four years ago. Plural marriages must be abandoned or our inencls in Washington will not defend us. "'Senator Vest of Missouri,' I went on, 'has always been a strong opponent of what he considered unconstitutional legislation against us, but he tells me he'll no longer oppose proscription if we continue m an attitude of defiance. . ."When I had done, he took up what I had said with a gesture that at once accepted and for the moment dismissed it; and he proceeded to a larger consideration of the situation, in words which I cannot pretend to recall, but to an effect which I wish to outline because it not only accounts for the preservation of the Mormon people from all their dangers, but contains a reason why the world might have wished to see them preserved. "'The Mormon people at that time had never written a line on socia reform except as the so-called 'revelations' established a new social order-but they had practiced whole volumes. Their com-H com-H on founded on the three principles of co-operation, contribution contribu-tion and arbitration. "By co-operation of effort they had 'equality of opportunity' (Continued '"n Piif Kirhl) FRANK J. CANNON'S SENSATION. Under the heading, "Despot Rule of Mormons Exposed by Cannon," Can-non," the Denver News reviews the first installment of a series of articles to appear in Everybody's Magazine, written by Frank J. Cannon, formerly of Ogden. The December Everybody's contains the introduction, and also a Frank Cannon's foreword, which is reproduced re-produced because of the local interest that attaches to the author of the sensational story and for the purpose of allowing our people to form their own judgment as to the effect the disclosures will have on the American people as a whole. Mr. Cannon says in part: "On the fourth day of January, 1896, the territory of Utah wras admitted to statehood, and the proscribed among its people were freed to the liberties of American citizenship, upon the solemn covenant cov-enant of the leaders of the Mormon church that they and their followers follow-ers would live, thereafter, according to the laws and institutions of the nation of which they were allowed to become a part. And that gracious settlement of upward of forty years of conflict was negotiated nego-tiated through responsible mediators, was indorsed by the good faith of the non-Mormons of Utah, and wras sealed by a treaty convention in which the high contracting parties were the American public and the 'Kingdom of God on Earth.' j "I propose, in this narrative, to show that the leaders of the Mormon church have broken their covenant with the nation, that they have abused the confidence of the Gentiles of Utah and betrayed the trust of the people under their power by using that power to prevent the state of Utah from becoming what it had engaged to become. be-come. "I propose to show that the people of Utah, upraised to freedom by the magnanimity of the nation, are being made to appear traitorous traitor-ous to the generosity that saved them; that the Mormons of Utah are being falsely misled into the peculiar dangers from which they thought they had forever escaped; that the unity, solidarity, the loyalty loy-alty of these fervent people is being turned as a weapon of offense against the whole country, for the greater profit of the leaders and the aggrandizement of their power." The narative begins with a description of a midnight visit paid by young Frank Cannon to his father, who was "secreted on the Underground," in hiding from the federal officials in 18S8, in the days when the federal government was making its raid to suppress the polygamous of the Mormon church. Describing the situation of the Mormon church at that time, the author writes : "A more despairing situation than theirs, at that hour, has never been faced by an American community. Practically every Mormon man of any distinction was in prison, or had just served his term, or had escaped into exile. Hundreds of Mormon women had left their homes and their children to flee from the officers of the law; many had been behind prison bars for refusing to answer the questions put to them in court; more were concealed, like outlaws, in the houses of friends. "Husbands and wives, separated by the necessities of flight, had died apart, miserably. Old men were coming out of prison, broken in health. A young plural wife whom I knew a mere girl, of good breeding, of gentle life seeking refuge in the mountains to save her husband from a charge of 'unlawful cohabitation,' had had her infant die in her arms on the road; and she had been compelled to bury the child, wrapped in her shawl, under a rock, in a grave that she scratched in the soil with a stick. In our day! ' In our civilized state ! "Moreover, the Mormons were being slowly but surely deprived ' kets those political rights like a sultan. Of all these, Smith n, to the nation now, cf most importance and sinhterly so. "No Mormon in these years, I think, had more hate than Smith for the United States government; and surely none had better reasons rea-sons to give himself for hate. He had the bitter recollection of the assassination of his father and his uncle in the jail of Carthage, 111.; he could remember the journey that he had made with his widowed mother across the Mississippi, across the Missouri and across the unknown desert west, in ox teams, half-starved, unarmed, perse- cuted by civilization and at the mercy of savages; he could remcm- j ber all the toils and hardships of pioneer days "in the valley;" he had seen the army of '58 arrive to complete, as he believed, the final destruction of our people; he had suffered from all the proscriptivc legislation of 'the raid,' been outlawed, been in exile, been in hiding, hunted like a thief " In 1385 and 1S86 George Q. Cannon had been fleeing from the United States marshals. Ho was captured in Nevada and was returned re-turned to Utah in the custody of the federal officers. Frank Cannon and others were preparing- to rescue him when they learned that he had fallen from the passenger train on which he was being brought home. He was recaptured and taken before a federal judge, who placed him under a $45,000 bond. In the excited state of public feeling, with the grand jury in session to investigate the affairs of the Cannon family, it was not strange that the younger Cannons were wrought up to high pitch of anger and came into conflict with the federal officers more than once. It became apparent that Chief Justice Zane would give George Q. Cannon a sentence that would keep him in prison for years. Frank Cannon formed the bold plan of getting Judge Zane removed re-moved and a judge appointed who would be more lenient. How he succeeded in his purpose is one of the most marvelous as well as one of the most intensely interesting passages of the first installment. EDITORIAL (Continued from Pajre Four) not equality of individual capacity, which the accidents of nature prevent, but an equal opportunity for each individual to develop himself him-self to the last reach of his power. "By contribution by requiring each man to give one-tenth of his income to a common fund they had attained the desired end of modern civilization, the abolition of poverty, and had adjusted the straps of the community burden to the strength of the individual to bear it. ( "By arbitration, they had effected the settlement of every dispute dis-pute of every kind without litigation; for their high councils decided de-cided all sorts of personal or neighborhood disputes without expense of money to the disputants. "The 'storehouse of the Lord' has been kept open to fill every need of the poor among God's people, and opportunities for self-help had been created out of the common fund, so that neither unwilling idleness nor privation might mar the growth of the community or progress of the individual. "But Joseph Smith had gone farther. Daring to believe himself the earthly representative of Omnipotence, whose duty it was to see that all had the rights to which he thought them entitled, and assuming assum-ing that ax woman's chief right was that of wifehood and maternity, he had instituted the practice of plural marriage, as a 'prophet of God,' on the authority of a direct revelation from the Almighty. "It was upon this rock that the whole enterprise, the whole experiment ex-periment in religious communism, now threatened to split. Not that polygamy was so large an incident in the life of the community for only a small portion of the Mormons were living in plural marriage. And not that this practice was a cardinal sin of LTormonism for among intelligent men, then as now, the great, objection to the church was its assumption of authority to hold the 'temporal power,' to dictate in politics, to command action and to acquit of responsibility. responsi-bility. "But polygamy was the offense against civilization which the opponents of Mormonism could always cite in order to direct against the church the concentrated antagonism of the government of the western world. And my father, in authorizing me to proceed to Washington as a sort of ambassador of the church, evidently wished to impress upon me the larger importance of the value of the social experiment which the Mormons had, to this time, so successfully advanced." ad-vanced." Describing Joseph F. Smith, the writer says: "Joseph F. Smith! Since the death of the founder of the Mormon Mor-mon church there have been three men pre-eminent in its history: Erigham Younj, who led the people across the desert into the Salt Lake valley and established them in prosperity there; George Q. Cannon, Can-non, who directed their policies and secured their national rights; and Joseph F. Smith, who today rules over that prosperity and mar- |