n Senator who voted
against it. A useless sacrifice! And yet if it had been my one act of
public life, I should still be glad of it. The "interests" that forced
the passage of that bill are those that have since exploited the country
so shamefully. It is their control of Republican party councils that has
since caused the loss of popular faith in Republicanism and the split in
the party which threatens to disrupt it. It is their control of politics
in Utah that has destroyed the whole value of the Mormon experiment
in communism and made the Mormon Church an instrument of political
oppression for commercial gain. They are the most dangerous domestic
enemy that the nation has known since the close of the Civil War. My
opposition was as doomed as such single independence must always be--but
at least it was an opposition. There is a consolation in having been
right, though you may have been futile!

My father, visiting Washington soon afterwards, took occasion to
criticize my vote publicly, in a newspaper interview; but he was
content, by that criticism, to clear himself and his colleagues of
any responsibility for my act. "You made a great mistake," he told me
privately. "You are alienating the friends who have done so much for
us." He added as if casually--with an air of off-handedness that was
significant to me--"You lay yourself open to attack from your political
enemies. When a man's head is high, it is easily hit." I was afterwards
to understand how serious a danger he then foresaw and thus predicted.

Many reports soon reached me of attacks that were being made upon me
by the ecclesiastical authorities, particularly by Joseph F. Smith and
Apostle Heber J. Grant. The formal criticism passed upon me by my father
was magnified to make my tariff vote appear an inexcusable party and
community defection. A vigorous and determined opposition was raised
against me. And in this, Smith and his followers were aided by
the perfect system of Church control in Utah--a system of complete
ecclesiastical tyranny under the guise of democracy.

Practically every Mormon man is in the priesthood. Nearly every Mormon
man has some concrete authority to exercise in addition to holding his
ordination as an elder. Obedience to his superiors is essential to his
ambition to rise to higher dignity in the church; and obedience to his
superiors is necessary in order to attract obedience to himself from his
subordinates. There can be no lay jealo