The Mormon question having come once more prominently before the country through the enactments of Congress against it, the editor of the _North American Review_ visited Utah for the express purpose of soliciting President Taylor to write an article on the then present state of the Mormon question, which he did, reviewing the operations of the recently passed Edmunds law; and in addition to that, refuted many of the false, slanderous misrepresentations, both new and old, respecting the Saints. Meantime the storm which President Taylor had predicted at the April conference in 1882, burst upon the Saints in all its fury. The conspirators against the Church of Christ, in the Edmunds enactment, had a law under which they hoped to be able to destroy its power. The first act of the Commission appointed by that law, was to frame a test oath which they required every person to take before he was permitted to register or vote. This practically disfranchised a whole Territory at one fell swoop; and in order to be reinstated as a voter, every man had to take the oath, which required him to swear that he had never simultaneously lived with more than one woman "_in the marriage relation_;" or if a woman, that she was not the wife of a polygamist, nor had she entered into any relation with any man in violation of the laws of the United States concerning polygamy and bigamy. By this arrangement it will be seen that those who cohabited with more than one woman in adultery or prostitution, were not affected by its provisions. The _roue_, the libertine, the strumpet, the brothel-keeper, the adulterer and adulteress could vote. No matter how licentious a man or a woman might be, all but the Mormons were screened and protected in the exercise of the franchise by the ingenious insertion of the clause, "in the marriage relation," a clause which nowhere appears in the Edmunds law. Such broad constructionists were the Commission, that they declared no man or woman who had ever been a member of a family practicing plural marriage, should be permitted to register or vote, no matter what their present status might be. As a case in point, President Taylor himself relates the following incidents connected with the operations of this law. They are from the article above referred to in the _North American Review_: