Professor Driggs apparently realized the strangeness of such a proposition, coming from a great educator; discussing the matter on the floor of the Salt Lake convention, he said he had not known the contents of the notice when he gave it. Somebody had handed it to him—he thought perhaps it was Mr. Magill, the field secretary—and asked him to give the notice, and he did so. Dear, innocent, trusting Mormon educator—you could hardly believe that he was forty-seven years of age! Before you decide what to believe about him, wait and see what use the gang made of that alleged notice. They had a whole year to work in, and they went at it systematically. They drafted an amendment to the charter of the N. E. A., known as Section 12, providing that it might be organized as a delegate body and governed by a representative assembly. The gang leaders spent much time in our national capital, getting this charter amendment passed by Congress and signed by the President. When our leading plutocratic educators appear in Washington, asking to be permitted to govern their school proletariat in their own way, how should a plutocratic Congress refuse? The amendment was being trumpeted over the country as a plan to make the N. E. A. “democratic.” The President of the United States had just made the whole world “democratic,” so it was to be expected that he would approve the plan and sign the bill. CHAPTER LII MORMON MAGIC Come now to Salt Lake City, and see why the N. E. A. machine selected it for their next convention. Externally there are reasons, in the form of beautiful temples and educational institutions, erected by the devotees of a weird religious cult. This cult is based upon “certain tablets having the appearance of gold,” which were dug out of the ground by an ignorant New York farmer-youth named Joseph Smith, and were found to be miraculously inscribed with fantastic chronicles in biblical language; Smith was able to interpret them by the aid of two magic stones, and they are now the inspired word of God to half a million people. One of the customs recommended in this “word” is the patriarchal Old Testament virtue of polygamy, and the United States government fought a little war with the Mormons over this issue, and Utah was not admitted as a state until the chiefs had agreed to follow the example of the rest of our plutocracy, and keep their polygamy under cover.