neighbors; within the month, on one detected occasion, he stood at the portals of your public schools and gave his insidious pamphlets, preaching Mormonism, into the hands of your children.
More, the Mormon Church has, in addition to its religious, its political side, and teaches not only immorality, but treason. On a far-away 5th of November a certain darksome Guy Fawkes and his confederates, all with a genius for explosives, planned to blow up the British Government by blowing up its parliament, and went some distance towards carrying out their plot. The Mormon Church of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, is employed upon a present and somewhat similar conspiracy against this Government, with Senator Smoot as the advance guard or agent thereof in the halls of our national legislature.
As this is written, a Senate inquiry into this conspiracy wags slowly yet searchingly forward. Stripped of formality of phrase and reset in easier English, the question which the Senate Committee is trying to solve is this: Is the Mormon Church in conspiracy against the Government, with Senator Smoot's seat as a first fruit of that conspiracy? As corollary comes the second query: To which does Senator Smoot give primary allegiance, the Church or the nation?
By every sign and signal smoke of evidence the conspiracy charged exists, with President Smith of the Mormon Church its chief architect and expositor. Smoot takes his seat in the upper house of Congress with a first purpose of carrying forth, so far as lies within his hands, the plans of the conspirators. What is the purpose of the conspirators? To protect themselves and their fellow Mormons in the criminal practice of polygamy, and prevent their prosecution as bigamists by the Utah courts.
The inquiry has already uncovered Mormonism in many of its evil details, and retold most, if not all, of those stories of pious charlatanism and religious crime which, during seventy-five years of its existence, make up the annals of the Mormon Church. As a first proposal it was explained in evidence before the committee that in no sort had the Mormon Church abated or abandoned polygamy as either a tenet or a practice. Indeed, the present conspiracy aims to produce conditions in Utah under which polygamy may flourish safe from the ax of law. In the old days, when Brigham Young ruled, the Mormons were safe with sundry thousands of desert miles between the law and them. Then they feared nothing save strife within the Church, and that would be no mighty peril. Brigham Young would put it down with the Danites. He had his Destroying Angels, himself at their head, and when a man rebelled he was murdered.
Mormonism is not, when a first fanaticism has subsided, a religion that would address the popular taste. It is a religion of gloom, of bitterness, of fear, of iron hand to punish the recalcitrant. It demands slavish submission on the part of every man. It insists upon abjection, self-effacement, a surrender of individuality on the part of every woman. The man is to work and obey; the woman is to submit and bear children; all are to be for the Church, of the Church, by the Church, hoping nothing, fearing nothing, knowing nothing beyond the will of the Church. The money price of Mormonism is a tithe of the member's income - the Church takes a tenth. The member may pay in money or in kind; he may sell and pay his tenth in dollars, or he may bring to the tithing yard his butter, or eggs, or hay, or wheat, or whatever he shall raise as the harvest of his labors.