He begins his story with the year 1888, and devotes the first chapters to a depiction of the miseries of the Mormon people in the unhappy days of persecution. He continues with the private details of the confidential negotiations in Washington and the secret conferences in Salt Lake City by which the Mormons were saved. He gives the truth about the political intrigues that accompanied the grant of Utah's statehood, and he relates, pledge by pledge, the covenants then given by the Mormon leaders to the nation and since treasonably violated and repudiated by them. He explains the progress of this repudiation with an intimate "inside" knowledge of facts which the Mormon leaders now deny. And he exposes the horror of conditions in Utah today as no other man in America could expose them--for his life has been spent in combating the influences of which these conditions are the result; and he understands the present situation as a doctor understands the last stages of a disease which he has been for years vainly endeavoring to check. But aside from all this--aside from his exposure of the Mormon despotism, his study of the degradation of a modern community, or his secret history of the Church's dark policies in "sacred places"--he relates a story that is full of the most astonishing curiosities of human character and of dramatic situations that are almost mediaeval in their religious aspects. He goes from interviews with Cleveland or Blame to discuss American politics with men who believe themselves in direct communication with God--who talk and act like the patriarchs of the Old Testament--who accept their own thoughts as the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and deliver their personal decisions, reverently, as the Will of the Lord. He shows men and women ready to suffer any martyrdom in defense of a doctrine of polygamy that is a continual unhappiness and cross upon them. He depicts the social life of the most peculiar sect that has ever lived in a Western civilization. He writes--unconsciously, and for the first time that it has ever been written--the naive, colossal drama of modern Mormonism. H. J. O'H. Forward On the fourth day of January, 1896, the territory of Utah was admitted to statehood, and the proscribed among its people were freed to the liberties of American citizenship, upon the solemn covenant of the leaders of the Mormon Church that they and their followers would live, thereafter, according to the laws and institutions of the nation of which they were allowed to become a part. And that gracious settlement of upwards of forty years of conflict was negotiated through responsible mediators, was endorsed by the good faith of the non-Mormons of Utah, and was sealed by a treaty convention in which the high contracting parties were the American Republic and the "Kingdom of God on Earth."