they belong to Him that
sends you. Then don't make a choice of any of those sheep; don't
make selections before they are brought home and put into the
fold. You understand that! Amen."

When the Edmunds law was passed, and punishment and confiscation
and exile became the order, even dullwits among Mormons knew that
the day of terror and bloodshed as a system of Church defense was
over with and done. Then the Mormons made mendacity take the
place of murder, and went about to do by indirection what before
they had approached direct. Prophet Woodruff was conveniently
given a "revelation" to the effect that polygamy might be
abandoned. They none the less kept the Mormon mind in leash for
its revival. The men were still taught subjection; the women were
still told that wifehood and motherhood were their two great
stepping-stones in crossing to the heavenly shore, missing which
they would be swept away. Meanwhile, and in secret, those same
heads of the Church - Smith, the President, Cluff, the head of
the Mormon College, Tanner, chief of the Young Men's Mutual
Improvement Association - took unto themselves plural wives by
way of setting an example and to keep the practical fires of
polygamy alive.

True, these criminals ran risks, and took what President Smith in
his recent testimony, when telling of his own quintette of
helpmeets, called "the chances of the law." To lower these risks,
and diminish them to a point where in truth they would be no
risks, the Mormon Church, under the lead of its bigamous
President several years rearward, became a political machine. It
looked over the future, considered its own black needs as an
outlaw, and saw that its first step towards security should be
the making of Utah into a State. As a territory the hand of the
Federal power rested heavily upon it; the Edmunds law could be
enforced whenever there dwelt a will in Washington so to do. Once
a State, Utah would slip from beneath the pressure of that iron
statute. The Mormons would at the worst face nothing more
rigorous than the State's own laws against bigamy, enforced by
judges and juries and sheriffs of their own selection, and jails
whereof they themselves would weld the bars and hew the stones
and forge the keys.

With that, every Mormon effort of lying promise and pretense of
purity were put forward to bring statehood about. What Gentiles
were then in Utah exerted themselves to a similar end, and made
compacts, and went, as it