from its success as a sort of religious socialism administered for the
common good to its present failure as a hierarchical capitalism governed
for the benefit of its modern "Prophet of Mammon" at the expense of the
liberty, the happiness, and even the prosperity, of its victims.

For the first time in the history of the Mormon Church, there has
arrived a man who has the knowledge and the inclination to explain it.

He does this fearlessly, as a duty, and without any apologies, as a
public right. "He is not, and never has been an official member of the
Church, in any sense or form," Joseph F. Smith, as President of the
Church, testified concerning him, at Washington in 1904; and though this
statement is one of the inspired Prophet's characteristic perversions of
the truth, it covers the fact that Senator Cannon has always opposed the
official tyrannies of the hierarchs. The present Mormon leaders accepted
his aid in freeing Utah, well aware of his independence. They profited
by his success with a more or less doubtful gratitude. They betrayed him
promptly--as they betrayed the nation and their own followers--as soon
as they found themselves in a position safely to betray. In this book he
merely continues an independence which he has always maintained, and
replies to secret and personal treason with a public criticism, to which
he has never hesitated to resort.

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