and act like the patriarchs of the Old
Testament--who accept their own thoughts as the inspiration of the Holy
Ghost, and deliver their personal decisions, reverently, as the Will
of the Lord. He shows men and women ready to suffer any martyrdom in
defense of a doctrine of polygamy that is a continual unhappiness and
cross upon them. He depicts the social life of the most peculiar sect
that has ever lived in a Western civilization. He writes--unconsciously,
and for the first time that it has ever been written--the naive,
colossal drama of modern Mormonism.

H. J. O'H.

Forward

On the fourth day of January, 1896, the territory of Utah was admitted
to statehood, and the proscribed among its people were freed to the
liberties of American citizenship, upon the solemn covenant of the
leaders of the Mormon Church that they and their followers would live,
thereafter, according to the laws and institutions of the nation of
which they were allowed to become a part. And that gracious settlement
of upwards of forty years of conflict was negotiated through responsible
mediators, was endorsed by the good faith of the non-Mormons of Utah,
and was sealed by a treaty convention in which the high contracting
parties were the American Republic and the "Kingdom of God on Earth."

I propose, in this narrative, to show that the leaders of the Mormon
Church have broken their covenant to the nation; that they have abused
the confidence of the Gentiles of Utah and betrayed the trust of the
people under their power, by using that power to prevent the state of
Utah from becoming what it had engaged to become. I propose to show
that the people of Utah, upraised to freedom by the magnanimity of the
nation, are being made to appear traitorous to the generosity that
saved them; that the Mormons of Utah are being falsely misled into the
peculiar dangers from which they thought they had forever escaped; that
the unity, the solidarity, the loyalty of these fervent people is being
turned as a weapon of offense against the whole country, for the
greater profit of the leaders and the aggrandizement of their power. I
undertake, in fact, in this narrative, to expose and to demonstrate what
I do believe to be one of the most direful conspiracies of treachery in
the history of the United States.

Not that I have anything in my heart against the Mormon people! Heaven
forbid! I know them to be great in their virtues, wholesome in their
relations