| OCR Text |
Show A Conservative View of Utah. The Nation of December 24th has the following on the Utah question : "We must not let eagerness to put down polygamy in Utah carry us into mischievous excess. The bill introduced by Senator Edmunds Ed-munds providing for a seizure of the property prop-erty of the Mormon church seems to point in this direction. It empowers the President to appoint fourteen trustees to administer this property, and to make reports on it to the Secretary of the Interior. The sole reason for this is that certain members of the Mormon church practice polygamy, and the Mormon clergy teach its lawfulness, if not its righteousness. Apart from polygamy polyg-amy there seems to be no more objection to to the Mormon church than to any church in which the clergy are very powerful and the people very ignorant. Polygamy is now a legal offense, and it has been the practice of the United States heretofore, and a very wholesome practice it is, when legal offenses are committed, to search out and punish those, and those only, J who commit them, by due. process of law. The prevention pre-vention of offenses by the seizure of property, whether belonging to corporations corpora-tions or individuals, such as the Edmunds bill contemplates, is, we believe, something hitherto unknown in our jurisprudence or politics, and might prove . a most unfortunate unfortu-nate precedent. If the Mormon church has no legal or proper standing, it ought to be wound up in the usual way, and its property distributed among the parties in interest. Its seizure and administration by Government Govern-ment trustees would be a proceeding which we trust Congress will never sanction for any purpose whatever. |
