Only two other senators made anything like such a despicable record.] It began to be more and more apparent that whatever success we might achieve locally, the power of the financial and political allies of the Prophets in Washington, aided by the executive "Big Stick" of the President, would beat us back from any attempt to rouse the state or the nation to our support. Smoot was in a happy position: all the senators who represented the "Interests" were for him, and all the senators who represented the supposed progressive sentiment of Theodore Roosevelt were also for him. The women of the nation had sent a protest with a million signatures to the Senate; but they had not votes; they received, in reply, a public scolding. Long before the Senate voted on its committee's report, many of the notorious "new" polygamists of the Church returned from their exile in foreign missions and began to walk the streets of Salt Lake with their old swagger of self-confident authority. We foresaw the end. Early in December, 1906, Senator J. C. Burrows of Michigan, chairman of the committee that had investigated Smoot, called up the committee's report and spoke upon it in a denunciation of Smoot. Senator Dubois of Idaho followed, two days later, with a supplementary attack, and censured President Roosevelt for "allowing his name and office" to be used in defense of the Mormons. After an interval of a month, Senator Albert J. Hopkins, of Illinois, undertook to reply with a defense of Smoot that reduced the Apostle's excuses to the absurd. Smoot, he declared, had opposed polygamy, "even from his infancy;" there was "nothing in the constitution" prohibiting "a State from having an established Church;" the old practices of Mormonism were dying out; and Smoot, as an exponent of the newer Mormonism, was largely responsible for the improvement. This bold falsehood was received with laughter by the members who had heard the testimony before the Senate committee or read the record of its sittings; but it was wired to all newspapers; and the contradictions that followed it failed (for reasons) to get the same publicity. It was repeated by Senator Sutherland (January 22, 1907); and he had the audacity to add that the Mormon Church, as well as Smoot, was opposed to polygamy; that the "sporadic cases" of new polygamy were "reprehended by Mormon and Gentile alike;" that polygamous marriages in Utah had been forbidden by the Enabling Act, but that polygamous cohabitation had been left to the state; and that the latter was rapidly dying out. And Sutherland knew, as every public man in Utah knew, that almost every word of this statement was untrue.