is company the sugar trust holds fifty-one
per cent. So that between 1902 and 1906 a partnership in the manufacture
of beet sugar was effected between the Church and the trust; and Apostle
Smoot became a Sugar trust Senator, and argued and voted as such.

Furthermore, it was at this same period that the Church sold the
street railway of Salt Lake City and its electric power company to the
"Harriman interests" under peculiar circumstances--a matter of which I
have written in an earlier chapter. The Church owners of this Utah Light
and Railway Company, through the Church's control of the City Council,
had attempted to obtain a hundred-year franchise from the city on terms
that were outrageously unjust to the citizens; and finally, on June 5,
1905, a franchise was obtained for fifty years, for the company of
which Joseph F. Smith was the president. On August 3, 1905, another city
ordinance was passed, consolidating all former franchises, then held
by the Utah Light and Power Company, but originally granted to D. F.
Walker, the Salt Lake and Ogden Gas and Electric Light Company, the
Pioneer Power Company and the Utah Power Company; and this ordinance
extended the franchises to July 1, 1955. The properties were bonded for
$6,300,000, but it was understood that they were worth not more than
$4,000,000. They were sold to "the Harriman interests" for $10,000,000.
The equipment of the Salt Lake City street railway was worse than
valueless, and the new company had to remove the rails and discard
the rolling stock. But the ten millions were well invested in this
public-utility trust, for the company had a monopoly of the street
railway service and electric power and gas supply of Salt Lake City; and
its franchises left it free to extort whatever it could from the people
of the whole country side, by virtue of a partnership with the Church
authorities whereby extortion was given the protection of "God's
anointed Prophets."

Joseph F. Smith, of course, was already a director of Harriman's Union
Pacific Railroad, a position to which he had been elected after his
accession to the First Presidency. And he was so elected not because of
his railroad holdings--for he came to the Presidency a poor man--and
not because of his ability or experience as a financier or a railroad
builder, for he had not had any such experience and he had not shown
any such ability. He was elected because of the partnership between the
Church leaders and the Un