tions and none seemed perturbed. And this
is typical of the Mormon family. I think the experiences through which
the people have passed have given them a quality of cheerful patience.
They have been schooled to bear persecution with quiet fortitude.
Tragedy sweeps by them in the daily current of life. A young man goes
on a mission, and dies in a foreign land; and his parents accept their
bereavement like Spartans, almost without mourning, sustained by the
religious belief that he has ended his career gloriously. Taught to
devote themselves and their children and their worldly goods to the
service of their Church, they accept even the impositions and injustices
of the Church leaders with a powerful forbearance that is at once a
strength and a weakness.

Two days later I was met on the street by a young Dutch elder, who could
scarcely speak English, and he gave me the official document from
the bishop's court notifying me that I had been "disfellowshipped for
un-Christianlike conduct and apostasy." I was then summoned to appear
before the High Council of the Stake in excommunication proceedings, and
after filing a defense which it is unnecessary to give here--and after
refusing to appear before the Council for reasons that it is equally
unnecessary to repeat I was excommunicated on March 14, 1905. No denial
was made by the Church authorities of any of the charges which I had
made against Smith. No trial was made of the truth of those charges. As
a free citizen of "one of the freest communities under the sun," I was
officially ostracized by order of the religious despot of the community
for daring to utter what everyone knew to be the truth about him.

For myself, of course, no edict of excommunication had any terrors; but
the aim of the authorities was to make me suffer through the sufferings
of my family; and, in that, they succeeded. I shall not write of it. It
has little place in such a public record as this, and I do not wish
to present myself, in any record, as a martyr. It was not I who was
ostracized from the Mormon Church by my excommunication; it was the
right of free speech. The Mormon Church deprived me of nothing; it
deprived itself of the helpful criticism of its members. No anathema of
bigotry could take from me the affection of my family or the respect
of any friends whose respect was worth the coveting. In that regard I
suffered only in my pity for those of my neighbors who were so blindly
servile to the