I had been urged to go to Washington by the Presidency to do what I might to allay Republican antagonism, and I found that a number of self-appointed lobbyists (who expected political preferment's and other rewards from the Church in the event of statehood) had been using the most amazing arguments in our behalf. For example, they told some of the "financial Senators" that the Church had fourteen million dollars in secret funds with which to help build a railroad to the coast as soon as statehood should be granted. They cited the number of the Church's adherents in all the states and territories of the Pacific Coast and as far east as Iowa and Missouri, and predicted that the gratitude of these people to the Republicans who were helping to free Utah would enable the Republican party to control a balance of political power in the several states. They declared positively that plural marriages and plural marriage living had utterly ceased among the Mormons for all time. And they made such statements with great particularity to Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut, who was too wise a man to credit them. As soon as I returned to Washington, he summoned me to a private meeting, in his parlor in the Arlington Hotel, and confronted me with one of the Republican lobbyists who had been soliciting his personal favor and his almost controlling influence. "Now, Mr. Cannon," he said, in his dry way, "have the Mormons stopped living with their plural wives? And will there never be another case of plural marriage among them?" I remembered the lesson of my interview with him at the time of the campaign against the disfranchisement bill, and I answered: "No. Not all the men of the Church have complied fully with the law. So far as I know, all the general authorities of the Church--with two or three exceptions--are fulfilling the covenant they gave; and so far as I can judge there will never be another plural marriage ceremony with the consent or connivance of the leaders of the Church. But human nature is very much the same in Utah as it is in Connecticut. Here and there, no doubt, a man feels that he's under an obligation to keep his covenant with his plural wives in preference to the covenant of his accepted amnesty; and there and here, possibly, in the future, some man will break the law and defy the orders of the Church and take a plural wife. But the leaders of the Church do not countenance either proceeding, and any man who violates the law, in either respect, offends against the revelations of the Church and, I believe, will be dealt with as an apostate. I come direct from the Presidency of the Church, and I am authorized to pledge their word of honor that they will themselves obey the law and do all in their power as men and leaders to bring their people into harmony with the institutions of this country as rapidly as possible."