Moreover, in his desire to fill the coffers of the Church, he engaged in "practical politics" and made a profit out of Church influence, both in business enterprises and in political campaigns. He proved himself peculiarly qualified by nature to construct and direct a secret political machine--a machine whose operations were never to be observable except to the close student of Utah's ecclesiasticism--a machine that was to be all the more effective because of its silent certainty. As the succeeding chapters of this narrative will show, although he affected a fine superiority to unclean political work and always publicly professed that the Church of Christ was holding itself aloof from the strife of partisanship, there was no political event on which he did not fix the calculating eye of his ambitious clericalism and no candidacy that he did not reach with those slender but powerful fingers that controlled the destiny of a state and trifled with the honor of a people. His accession marked the change from the old to the new regime in Utah. Leadership was no longer a dangerous honor. Proscription no longer made the authorities of the Church strong by persecution--hardy chiefs of a poverty-stricken people--leaders as sensible of the obligations of power as their followers were faithful in their allegiance of duty. Political freedom and worldly prosperity made the office of President a luxurious sovereignty, easily tyrannical, fortified in its religious absolutism by its irresponsible power of finance, and protected in its social abuses, from the interference of the nation, by an alliance with the commercial rulers of the nation and by a duplicity that worldliness has learned to dignify with the respectability of material success. Chapter X. On the Downward Path During the last years of President Woodruff's life there had been a slow decline of the feeling that it was necessary for self-protection that the hierarchy should preserve a political control over the people. I cannot say that the feeling had wholly passed. It had continued to show itself, here and there, whenever a candidate was so pertinacious in his independence that words of disfavor were sent out from Church headquarters in one of those whispers that carry to the confines of the kingdom of the priests. But the progress was apparent. The tendency was clear. And in 1898 there was neither internal revolt nor external threat to provoke a renewal of the exercise of that force which is necessarily despotic if it be used at all.