from the people and the life that he has loved. He knows that
the religious zealots will feel that he has gone wilfully "into outer
darkness" through some deep and secret sin of his own; and that the
prudent members of the community will tell him that he should have "kept
his mouth shut." If there were a majority of the conference inclined
to protest against the re-election of any of its rulers, the lack of
communication, the pressure of training and the weight of fear would
keep them silent. And in this manner, from Prophet down to "Choyer
leader" (choir leader) the names are offered and "sustained by the free
vote of the freest people under the sun."

During the days just before the American party's political agitation, a
young Mormon, named Samuel Russell, returned from a foreign mission for
the Church and found that the girl whom he had been courting when he
went away was married as a plural wife to Henry S. Tanner, brother of
the other notorious polygamist, J. M. Tanner. The discovery that his
sweetheart was a member of the Tanner household drove Russell almost
frantic. She was the daughter of an eminent and wealthy family, of
remarkable beauty, well-educated and rarely accomplished. Young Russell
was a college student--a youth of intellect and high mind--and he
suffered all the torments of a horrifying shock. Unless he should choose
to commit an act of violence there was only one possible way for him to
protest. At the next conference, when the name of Henry S. Tanner was
read from the list to be "sustained"--as a member of the general Sunday
School Board--Russell rose and objected that Tanner was unworthy and a
"new" polygamist. He was silenced by remonstrances from the pulpit and
from the people. He was told to take his complaint to the President
of his Stake. He was denied the opportunity to present it to the
assemblage.

Almost immediately afterward, Tanner, for the first time in his life,
was honored with a seat in the highest pulpit of the Church among the
general authorities. And Russell was pursued by the ridicule of the
Mormon community, the persecution of the Church that he had served, the
contempt of the man who had wronged him, and the anger of the woman whom
he had loved. One of the reporters of the Deseret News, the Church's
newspaper, subsequently stated that he had been detailed, with others,
to pursue Russell day and night, soliciting interviews, plaguing
him with questions, and demanding the le