secret teaching of the Church. He courts
her as any other religious young girl might be courted--with little
attentions, at the meetings, over the music books--and he has, to aid
him, a religious exaltation in her, induced by his plea that she is to
enter into the mystery of the holy covenant, to become one of the most
faithful of a persecuted Church, to defy the wicked laws of its enemies.
She is just as happy in her betrothal as any other innocent girl of
her age. Even the secrecy is sweet to her. And then, some evening, they
saunter down a side street to a strange house--or even to a back
orchard where a man is waiting in a cowl under a tree (perhaps vulgarly
disguised as a woman with a veil over his face)--and they are married in
a mutter of which she hears nothing.

Such a case was related to me by a horrified mother who had discovered
that the marriage ceremony had been performed by an accomplice of the
libertine who had seduced her daughter and since confessed his crime.
But whether the ceremony be performed by a priest of the Church or by
a more unauthorized scoundrel, the girl is equally at the mercy of her
"husband" and equally betrayed in the world. Even in this case of the
pretended marriage, the elders of the ward hushed up the threatened
prosecution because the authorities of the Church objected to a
proceeding that might expose other plural marriages more orthodox.

Hundreds of Mormon men and women personally thanked me by letter or in
interviews at the Tribune office, for our editorial attacks upon the
hierarchy for encouraging these horrors. Strangers spoke to me on
railroad trains, thanking me and telling me of cases. Three Mormon
physicians, themselves priests of the Church, told me of innumerable
instances that had come to them in their practice, and said that they
did not know what was to become of the community. One Mormon woman wrote
me from Mexico to say that she had exiled herself there with her
husband and his two plural wives, and that she felt she had worked out
sufficient atonement for all her descendants; yet she saw girls of the
family on the verge of entering into plural marriage--if they had not
already done so--and she begged us to continue our newspaper exposures,
so that others might be saved from the bitter experiences of her life.

President Winder met me on the street in 1905, towards the close of the
year, and said: "Frank, you need not continue your fight against plural
marriag