ed that the
President should appoint a Legislative Council to take the place of
the elected legislature; and bills were being talked of in Congress
to effect a complete disfranchisement of the whole body of the Mormon
people by means of a test oath.

I did not then believe, and I do not now, that the practice of polygamy
was a thing which the American nation could condone. But I knew that our
people believed in it as a practice ordained, by a revelation from God,
for the salvation of the world. It was to them an article of faith as
sacred as any for which the martyrs of any religion ever died; and it
seemed that the nation, in its resolve to vindicate the supremacy of
civil government, was determined to put them to the point of martyrdom.

It was with this prospect before us that we drove, that night, up the
Salt Lake valley, across a corner of the desert, to the little town of
Bountiful; and as soon as we arrived among the houses of the settlement,
a man stepped out into the road, from the shadows, and stopped us.
Wilcken spoke to him. He recognized us, and let us pass. As we turned
into the farm where my father was concealed, I saw men lurking here and
there, on guard, about the grounds. The house was an old-fashioned adobe
farm-house; the windows were all dark; we entered through the kitchen.
And I entered, let me say, with the sense that I was about to come
before one of the most able among men.

To those who knew George Q. Cannon I do not need to justify that
feeling. He was the man in the hands of whose sagacity the fate of the
Mormons at that moment lay. He was the First Councillor of the Church,
and had been so for years. For ten years in Congress, he had fought and
defeated the proscriptive legislation that had been attempted against
his people; and Senator Hoar had said of him, "No man in Congress
ever served a territory more ably." He had been the intimate friend of
Randall and Blame. As a missionary in England he had impressed Dickens,
who wrote of him in "An Uncommercial Traveller." The Hon. James Bryce
had said of him: "He was one of the ablest Americans I ever met."

An Englishman, well-educated, a linguist, an impressive orator, a
persuasive writer, he had lived a life that was one long incredible
adventure of romance and almost miraculous achievement. As a youth he
had been sent by the Mormon leaders to California to wash out gold for
the struggling community; and he had sent back to Utah all the pro