The nation owes Utah such a rectification, for the nation has been, in this matter, a chief sinner and a strong encourager of sin. President Theodore Roosevelt, representing the majesty of the Republic, stayed us when we might have won our own liberties in the revolt that was provoked by the election of Senator Apostle Reed Smoot. Misled by political and personal advisers, the President procured delays in the Smoot investigation. He seduced senators from their convictions. He certified the ambassador from the Kingdom of God as a qualified senator of the United States. He gave the hand of fellowship to Joseph, the tyrant of the Kingdom. He rebuked our friends and his own, in their struggle for our freedom, by warning them that they were raising the flag of a religious warfare. He filled the Mormon priests with the belief that they might proceed unrestrainedly to the sacrifice of women and children upon the polygamous altar, to the absolute rule of politics in the intermountain states, and to the commercial exploitation of their community in partnership with the trusts. The one policy that President Taft seems to have accepted unimpaired from his predecessor is this same respect for the power of the Mormon kingdom. In his placid but wholehearted way he has encouraged his co-ordinate ruler, the Mormon Prophet, and extended the Executive license to the support and inevitable increase of these religious tyrannies of the Mormon hierarchs which now the people of Utah, unaided, are wholly unable to combat. And the nation owes such a rectification not only to Utah, but also to itself. The commercial and financial Plunderbund that is now preying upon the whole country is sustained at Washington by the agents of the Mormon Church. The Prophet not only delivers his own subjects up to pillage; he helps to deliver the people of the entire United States. His senators are not representatives of a political party; they are the tools of "the Interests" that are his partners. The shameful conditions in Utah are not isolated and peculiar to that state; they are largely the result of national conditions and they have a national effect. The Prophet of Utah is not a local despot only: he is a national enemy; and the nation must deal with him.