few days a revolution was completed that had been sought by the power
of our nation and of the civilized world, for a generation, with stripes
and imprisonment, death, confiscation and the ostracism of the country's
public contempt. It had been obtained, I knew, chiefly by the sagacity
of the First Councillor using the pressure of circumstances to enforce
the persuasions of diplomacy. I felt that a miracle of change had been
brought to pass. He had placed us on the road to freedom; and I trusted
his guidance to lead us to our goal.

That goal, to me personally, was the honor of American citizenship--an
ambition that had been an obsession with me from my earliest youth. I
had never heard a man on a railroad train talk of how he was going to
vote in a national election, without feeling a pang of shamed envy;
for my lack of citizenship seemed a mark of inferiority. The patriotic
reading of my boyhood had made the American republic, to me, the noblest
administration of freemen in the history of government and the exercise
of its franchise literally the highest dignity of human privilege. I
would have been as proud--I was as proud when the day came--to vote for
the President of the United States as he could have been to take his
oath of office. I do not believe that any poor serf, escaped from the
tyranny of Russia, ever saw the American shore with a more grateful eye
than I looked to the prospect of being admitted, with the citizens of
Utah, into the enfranchisement of the Republic.

But it was evident that the Church's recession from polygamy would not
be enough to free us, so long as its control of politics remained. Its
other practices had flourished and been sheltered under its political
power; and now that the Church had ceased to be a lawbreaker, our
friends in Washington were properly expecting that it would cease to
interfere with its members in the exercise of their citizenship. For
this reason, when I was notified that I had been selected as a member of
the advisory committee of the People's Party (the Church party), I went
at once to my father and told him that I would not take the place;
that I intended to work, personally, and through my newspaper, for the
political division of Utah on the lines of the national parties. He held
that until Gentile solidarity was dissolved, it would be dangerous to
divide the allegiance of the Mormons; but he did not stand against
my protest; he contented himself--diplomaticall