Show po THE RULING ON THE EDMUNDS LAW I The ruling of his honor Judge Zane in the Cannon case yesterday has one virtue in it at least and that is that in prosecu tions for unlawful cohabitation it is sufficient suffi-cient to show that it man and woman consort con-sort together as husband and wife and dwell in the same house and hold themselves them-selves out to the world as man and wife t o prove the charge of unlawful cohabita ion as it does away with that part of these trials which has been so revolting heretofore and which no man or woman in all Utah has doubted for a moment To defeat all endeavors to show that the association which it is now claimed must je proven existed has been held a high merit by those who have upheld the system which encouraged such associations associa-tions and to bring about such defeat all methods whether of truth or of falsehood false-hood whether refined or brutal have been tried Doing all things to prevent conviction no matter how heinous those things were nor how much in direct di-rect contravention of the most elementary rm mentary principles of truth and morality the loud cry of religious persecution has been raised when conviction con-viction followed after long and tedious trials had been gone through and where there was no doubt of the guilt of the defendant de-fendant as charged The defense of the crimes has been far more reprehensible than the crimes committed Surely the new ruling is in the interest of morality if ever a ruling was and while the question ques-tion of cohabitation different from that in this particular case was not decided yet it must be presumed that while Congress I primarily had in view the suppression of f polygamy they also had in view the promotion pro-motion of virtue and chastity among those who were not professors of the doctrine doc-trine of polygamy Ifthey had not then their law is lame indeed That the Mormon people have been a chaste people as a rule none will I deny but chastity is not the only virtue and when the system which they introduced intro-duced to promote and further chastity has been declared inconsistent with the foundation of society as recognized throughout the civilized world and it has been sought to suppress it all other virtues vir-tues have been sacrificed that the system might live Have not the evil results of the defense of the system far outweighed any good which it might otherwise have wrought In this same case of which we are now speaking when it was up before the Commissioner it took a great effort and long time to establish the paternity of a child of some three summers Are such things conducive to the highest moral excellence or even to the greatest chastity or are they intended to suppress sup-press those terrible evils of the mono I gamic system of marriage of which so much has been heard of late infanticide and fceticide and the social evil The rare occurrence in an early day in Utah of adultery and crimes against the marriage tie is as much due to the isolation and strong religious discipline of the Mormons as to their polygamic system sys-tem of marriage Had their marriage system been the monogamic under the same conditions which formerly existed here it would have been the same for being isolated and religious and holding unchastity to be about the greatest of all crimes the Mormons would still have held chastity the greatest of the virtues to which if necessary all others should be sacrificed Herein lie the true reasons rea-sons for the absence of brothels and their attendant evils When Judge Zane says that in the relation re-lation of the husband and wife lies the I foundation of society and that to alter that foundation is to strike at society he tells wherein polygamy is chiefly wrong To change the unit of the State is to change the State itself and to introduce as religion that which takes from the civil power of the State the right to define its own unit is to allow a sect to rule a nation na-tion The first great care of every citizen should be to preserve the civil power of his country inviolate as in its preservation preserva-tion lies the safety of all other rights The preservation of the family requires re-quires that personal virtue and chastity shall also be promoted and not allowed to be indiscriminately trampled underfoot under-foot But if Congress has been remiss in this regard so too has our own Legislature Legisla-ture and soon we shall have occasion to show wherein |