The Mormon Menace | Page 6

longer safe, profit by the Grecian's wisdom.
But the darkest side of Mormonism is seen when one considers the stamp of moral and mental degradation it sets upon those men and women who comprise what one might term the peasantry of the Church. Woman is, as the effect of Mormonism, peculiarly made to retrograde. Instead of being uplifted she is beaten down. She must not think; she must not feel; she must not know; she must not love. Her only safety lies in being blind and deaf and dull and senseless to every better sentiment of womanhood. She is to divide a husband with one or two or ten or twenty; she is not to be a wife, but the fraction of a wife. The moment she looks upon herself as anything other than a bearer of children she is lost. Should she rebel - and in her helplessness she does not know how to enter upon practical revolt - she becomes an outcast; a creature of no shelter, no food, no friend, no home. Woman is the basis or, if you will, the source and fountain of a race; woman is a race's inspiration. And what shall a race be, what shall its children be, with so lowered and befouled an origin?
At the hearing before the Senate Committee President Smith, stroking his long white beard in the manner of the patriarchs, made no secret of his five wives, and seemed to court the Gentile condemnation. This hardihood was of deliberate plan on the part of President Smith. He was inviting what he would call "persecution." He did not fear actual prosecution in the Utah courts; as to the Federal forums, those tribunals were powerless against him now that Utah was a State. Being safe in the flesh, President Smith would bring upon himself and Mormonism the whole fury of the press. It would serve to quiet schism and bicker within the Mormon Church. An opposition or a "persecution" would act as a pressure to bring Mormons together. That pressure would squeeze out the last drop of political independence among Mormons, which to the extent that it existed might interfere with his disposal of the compact Mormon vote. In short, an attack upon himself and upon Mormonism by the Gentiles would tighten the hold of President Smith, close-herd the Mormons, and leave them ready politically to be driven hither and yon as seemed most profitable for Church purposes.
Gray, wise, crafty, sly, soft, one who carries mendacity to the heights of art, President Smith gives in all he says and does and looks the color of truth to this explanation of his frankness. He would not prodigiously care if Smoot were cast into outer Senate darkness. It would not be an evil past a remedy. He could send Smoot back; and send him back again. Meanwhile, he might lift up the cry of the Church persecuted; that of itself would stiffen the Mormon line of battle and multiply recruits.
President Smith looks forward to a time when one Senate vote will be decisive. He cannot prophesy the day; but by the light of what has been, he knows that it must dawn. About a decade ago the Democrats took the Senate from the Republicans by one vote - Senator Peffer's. In Garfield's day the Senate, before Conkling stepped down and out, was in even balance with a tie. What was, will be; and President Smith intends, when that moment arrives and the Senate is in poise between the parties, to have at least one Utah vote, and as many more as he may, to be a stock in trade wherewith to traffic security for his Church of Mormon and its crimes. Given a balance of power in the Senate - and it might easily come within his hands - President Smith could enforce such liberal terms for Mormonism as to privilege it in its sins and prevent chance of punishment.
There be those who, for a Mormon or a personal political reason, will find fault with this work and its now appearance in print; they will argue that some motive of politics underlies the publication. It is fair to state that in so arguing they will be right. The motive is three-ply - made up of a purpose to withstand the Mormon Church as a political force, limit its spread as a so-called religion, and buckler the mothers and daughters and sisters of the country against an enemy whose advances are aimed peculiarly at them. The morals of a people are in the custody of its women; and, against Mormonism - that sleepless menace to American morality - these confessions of Lee the Danite are set in types to become a weapon in their hands. It was the womanhood of the nation that compelled