es
and the business of the community. The persecutions that our people had
borne had schooled them to co-operation. They were ready, helping one
another, to advance together to a common prosperity. They were under
the leadership chiefly of the man who had guided them out of a most
desperate condition of oppression toward the freedom of sovereign
self-government. In that progress he had saved everything that was
worthy in the Mormon communism; he had discarded much that was a curse.
I knew that he had no thought but for the welfare of the people; and
with such a man, leading such a following, we seemed certain of a future
that should be an example to the world.

But both the Church and the people had been involved in debt by
confiscation and proscription; and it was necessary now to free
ourselves financially. This work my father undertook in behalf of the
Presidency--for the President of the Mormon Church is not only the
Prophet, Seer and Revelator of God to the faithful; he is also "the
trustee in trust" of all the Church's material property. He is the
controller, almost the owner, of everything it owns. He is as sacred in
his financial as in his religious absolutism. He is accountable to no
one, The Church auditors, whom he appoints, concern themselves merely
with the details of bookkeeping. The millions of dollars that are paid
to him, by the people in tithes, are used by him as he sees fit to use
them; and the annual contributors to this "common fund" would no more
question his administration of it than they would question the ways of
divinity.

In the early days there had been a strongly animating idea that among
the divinely-authorized duties of leadership was the obligation to
develop the natural resources of the country in order to meet the
people's needs. As the immigrants poured into Utah, these needs
increased; and the Church leaders used the Church funds to develop coal
and iron mines, support salt gardens, build a railway, establish a sugar
factory (for which the people, through the legislature, voted a bounty),
conduct a beach resort, and aid a hundred other enterprises that
promised to be for the public good. These undertakings were not financed
for profit. They were semi-socialistic in their establishment and
half-benevolent in their administration.

But during "the days of the raid" they were neglected, because the
Church was involved in debt. And now it became pressingly necessary to
obtain money t