o restore the moribund industries and to meet the payments
that were continually falling due upon loans made to the Presidency.
President Woodruff called on me to aid in the work. So I came into touch
with a development of events that did not seem to me, then, of any great
importance; yet it drew as its consequence a connection between the
Mormon Church and the great financial "interests" of the East--a
connection that is one of the strong determining causes of the
perversion of government and denial of political liberty in Utah today.

I wish, here, simply to foreshadow, this connection. It will reappear in
the story again and again; and it is necessary to have the significance
of the recurrence understood in advance. But, at the time of which
I write, there was no more than an innocent approach on our part to
Eastern financiers to obtain money for the Church and to concentrate our
debts in the hands of two or three New York banks.

For example, the Church had loaned to, or endorsed for, the Utah Sugar
Company to the amount of $325,000; and my father had personally endorsed
the general obligations for this and other sums, although he owned
only $5,000 of the company's stock. He supported the factory with his
personal credit and assumed the risk of loss (without any corresponding
possibility of gain) in order to benefit the whole people by encouraging
the beet sugar industry. A vain attempt had been made to sell the bonds
in New York. Finally, the Church bought all the bonds of the company
for $325,000 (of a face value of $400,000), and we sold them, for the
Church, to Mr. Joseph Bannigan, the "rubber king," of Providence, Rhode
Island, for $360,000, with the guarantee of the First Presidency, the
trustee of the Church, and myself.

Similarly, the First Presidency led in building an electric power plant
in Ogden, after Chas. K. Bannister, a great engineer, and myself had
persuaded the members of the Presidency that the work would benefit the
community. The bonds of this company, too, were bought by Mr. Bannigan,
with the guarantee of the trustee of the Church, the Presidency and
myself. Both the power plant and the sugar factory were financially
successful. They performed a large public service beneficently. The fact
that Mr. Bannigan held their bonds was no detriment to their work and
wrought no injury to the people.

I single out these two enterprises because Joseph F. Smith has since
sold the power plant to the "H