"Where was this scene enacted? In the gorgeous palaces of Belshazzar, surrounded by his wives, concubines, and nobles, and where was seen written on the walls '_Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin_?' No. Was it at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, when ten righteous persons could not be found to avert the wrath of an offended God, or in Pompeii or Herculaneum, which, in their turn, for their libidinous and unrighteous practices, as Sodom and Gomorrah, suffered the vengeance of eternal fire? No. Was it at the Saturnalia of the Bacchanals of ancient Greece and Rome? No. Those nations have long been overthrown and are now only known to a few readers of ancient history. Was it during the reign of the first French Republic, when they elevated a prostitute as the goddess of reason? No. Was it in the days of the inquisition, when the rack, the gibbet, the faggot and the flames were brought into requisition to force unwilling victims to testify of things which their conscience forbade, and who perished by thousands for daring to think, and act, and believe in and worship God according to their own consciences? No. Was it under the influence of Bacchus, or in the midnight revelings as exhibited in Rome under Nero? No; this scene was enacted in mid-day, in the nineteenth century, in the year of our Lord, 1884, in the Federal court house, in Salt Lake City, at a court presided over by Judge Charles S. Zane, Chief Justice for the United States in the Territory of Utah, assisted by Prosecuting Attorney William H. Dickson, and the other adjuncts of the law, and in the presence of several hundred American citizens!" CHAPTER XLIII. THE STORM BURSTS UPON THE PEOPLE--THE MORALITY PLEA--WHO THE CRIMINALS ARE--TESTIMONY OF STATISTICS--A VISIT TO ARIZONA AND MEXICO--ASSAULT UPON THE PEOPLE IN ARIZONA--AN AMERICAN SIBERIA--SEEKING A PLACE OF REFUGE--IN SAN FRANCISCO--THREATENED WITH ARREST--RETURN TO UTAH--LAST SERMON--WARNING AND PROPHECY. The "storm" increased in violence. Special appropriations were made in Washington to aid in the enforcement of the infamous Edmunds law. With those funds deputy marshals were multiplied, some of them being men of notoriously immoral lives. They usually went in squads, pouncing first upon one village and then another, raiding the homes of the most respected and honorable men in the community, who were suspected of living with their plural wives--with women they had honored with the name of wife in some instances for more than a quarter of a century, by whom they had reared large and respectable families: and because they would not abandon them--thrust them away like unclean, nameless things--this pack of human hounds were turned loose upon them, to dog their footsteps, to invade their homes and insult their families.