Defense of the Faith and the Saints. B. H. Roberts

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      THE GENERAL SITUATION.

      Briefly reviewing the matters which I have offered here, and the logical deductions therefrom, I maintain the following propositions:

      We set aside the religion of the Mormon people as sacred from assault.

      Outside of religion the Mormons as a community are ruled by a special privileged class, constituting what I call the church monarchy.

      This monarchy pledged the country that there would be no more violations of law and no more defiance of the sentiment of the United States regarding polygamy and the plural marriage relation.

      This monarchy pledged the United States that it would refrain from controlling its subjects in secular affairs.

      Every member of this monarchy is responsible for the system of government and for the acts of the monarchy, since (as shown in the cases of the deposed apostle, Moses Thatcher, and others) the man who is not in accord with the system is dropped from the ruling class.

      This monarchy sets up a regal social order within this Republic.

      This monarchy monopolizes the business of one commonwealth and is rapidly reaching into others.

      This monarchy takes practically all the surplus product of the toil of its subjects for its own purpose, and makes no account to anyone on earth of its immense secret fund.

      This monarchy rules all politics in Utah, and is rapidly extending its dominion into other States and Territories.

      This monarchy permits its favorites to enter into polygamy and to maintain polygamous relations, and it protects them from prosecution by its political power.

      Lately no effort has been made to punish any of these people by the local law. On the contrary, the ruling monarch has continued to grow in power, wealth, and importance. He sits upon innumerable boards of directors, among others that of the Union Pacific Railway, where he joins upon terms of fraternity with the great financial and transportation magnates of the United States, who hold him in their councils because his power to benefit or to injure their possessions must be taken into account.

      I charge that no apostle has ever protested publicly against the continuation of this sovereign authority over the Mormon kingdom.

      Within a few months past the last apostle elected to the quorum was a polygamist—Charles W. Penrose—and his law-breaking career is well known. Previous to 1889 Penrose was living publicly with three wives. Under false pretenses to President Cleveland he obtained amnesty for his past offenses. He represented that he had but two wives, and that he married his second wife in 1862, while it was generally known that he took a third wife just prior to 1888. He promised to obey the law in the future, and to urge others to do so; yet after that amnesty, obtained by concealing his third marriage from President Cleveland, he continued living with his three wives. His action in this matter has been notorious. He has publicly defended this kind of law-breaking on the false pretense that there was a tacit understanding with the American Congress and people, when Utah was admitted, that these polygamists might continue to live as they had been living.

      And it was this traitor to his country's laws, this unrepentant knave and cheat of the nation's mercy, this defamer of Congress and the people, that was elected to the apostleship to help govern the church, and through the church the State.

      Is it not demonstrated that Utah is an abnormal State? Our problem is vast and complex. I have endeavored to simplify it so that the Senate and the country may readily grasp the questions at issue.

      THE REMEDY.

      Will this great body, will the Government of the United States, go on unheedingly while this church monarchy multiplies its purposes and multiplies its power? Has the nation so little regard for its own dignity and the safety of its institutions and its people that it will permit a church monarch like Joseph F. Smith to defy the laws of the country, and to override the law and to overrule the administrators of the law in his own State of Utah?

      What shall the Americans of that Commonwealth do if the people of the United States do not heed their cry?

      The vast majority of the Mormon people are law-abiding, industrious, sober, and thrifty. They make good citizens in every respect except as they are dominated by this monarchy, which speaks to them in the name of God and governs them in the spirit of Mammon. Any remedy for existing evils which would injure the mass of the Mormon people would be most deplorable. I believe that they would loosen the chains which they wear if it were possible. I think that many of them pay blood-money tithes simply to avoid social ostracism and business destruction. I believe that many of them do the political will of the church monarch because they are led to believe that the safety of the church monarchy is necessary in order that the mass may preserve the right to worship God according to the dictates of their conscience. The church monopoly, by its various agencies is usually able to uprear the injured and innocent mass of the Mormon people as a barrier to protect the members of that monarchy from public vengeance.

      It is the duty of this great body—the Senate of the United States—to serve notice on this church monarch and his apostles that they must live within the law; that the nation is supreme; that the institutions of his country must prevail throughout the land; and that the compact upon which statehood was granted must be preserved inviolate.

      May heaven grant that this may be effective and that the church monarchy in Utah may be taught that it must relinquish its grasp.

      I would not, for my life, that injury should come to the innocent mass of the people of Utah; I would not that any right of theirs should be lost, but that the right of all should be preserved to all.

      If the Senate will apply this remedy and the alien monarchy still proves defiant, it will be for others than myself to suggest a course of action consistent with the dignity of the country.

      In the meantime we of Utah who have no sympathy with the-now clearly defined purpose of this church monopoly will wage our battle for individual freedom, to lift the State to a proud position in the sisterhood, to preserve the compact which was made with the country, believing that behind the brave citizens in Utah who are warring against this alien monarchy stands the sentiment and power of eighty two millions of our fellow-citizens.

      II.

      Foreword.

       Table of Contents

      This speech was delivered in the Provo Tabernacle on the evening of March 14, 1905, in the presence of upwards of two thousand five hundred people, and the report of it was taken by Mr. Arthur Winter. When the speech was first published in full in the Deseret Evening News of March 25, 1905, the following explanatory note preceded it by the writer:

      A report of this speech in a local paper [the Salt Lake Tribune] contained many verbal inaccuracies and crudities which in many cases were the reporter's, not mine. It is too much to expect that extemporaneous speech will be free from verbal and rhetorical errors, and I do not claim that the speech as delivered at Provo was free from such defects. In the speech as here reported by Mr. Arthur Winter, some of these crudities have been eliminated so far as they could be and still retain the structure and spirit of what was said. One item has been added: a passage relating to the СКАЧАТЬ