In addition to his use of the petition he reprinted the testimony of President Woodruff before a Master of Chancery and tried to prove that the manifesto of 1890 prohibited cohabitation among those then in polygamy. He knew that the president of the church could not annul a marriage. He knew that the hearing was held preliminary to a decree restoring what {163} remained of the escheated church property. He knew that property was worth millions of dollars and the church needed it. There was not an attorney engaged in that hearing who did not want the church to get back its property. There was not a non-Mormon in Utah then mean enough to wish that the church might not get it. But there must be a record to the effect that polygamy had been given up. So President Woodruff consented to say that he included "cohabs" in his manifesto. At that time the editor of the Salt Lake Tribune was friendly, as I have shown, and although it now seeks to brand President Woodruff as a liar it said then that the manifesto "went only to the point of plural marriages," and added "we believe that the rule laid down has been as sacredly kept by this people as it would have been done by any other people; that the Mormons and Gentiles have a right to say that the change amounts to a transfiguration." The measureless infamy of the disappointed office seeker now seeking to pile odium upon the honored dead will be a fitting monument to his malodorous memory in Utah for years to come; and if our good old friend did stretch the truth to save that property it was a lie like that of Hugo's nun, the recording angel dropped a tear upon the slate and rubbed it out. All this insanity of excitement through the country over alleged polygamous marriages has been created by a few men who are now laughing over their success in fooling the people. They have hunted these mountain states over--have imported special aid from New York--have declared that plural marriages are being contracted, and yet have not been able to find one case. Defeated in that they have arrested several men for "unlawful cohabitation" and advertised that as proof of polygamous marriages. Avowing, with maledictions upon it, that polygamy is the "twin-relic of barbarism" and must die, they yet will not let it die, but drag it from its senile sleep, enhorse and caparison it like a waxen image of some old Catholic saint and lead it in triumphal procession through the land to excite the clamor of women gone hysterical through brooding in nightly loneliness over the clandestine amours of their monogamous husbands with other women more charming than themselves!