rights to which he thought them entitled, and assuming that a woman's
chief right was that of wifehood and maternity, he had instituted the
practice of plural marriage, as a "Prophet of God," on the authority of
a direct revelation from the Almighty. It was upon this rock that the
whole enterprise, the whole experiment in religious communism, now
threatened to split. Not that polygamy was so large an incident in the
life of the community--for only a small proportion of the Mormons were
living in plural marriage. And not that this practice was the cardinal
sin of Mormonism--for among intelligent men, then as now, the great
objection to the Church was its assumption of a divine authority to hold
the "temporal power," to dictate in politics, to command action and to
acquit of responsibility. But polygamy was the offense against
civilization which the opponents of Mormonism could always cite in order
to direct against the Church the concentrated antagonism of the
governments of the Western world. And my father, in authorizing me to
proceed to Washington as a sort of ambassador of the Church, evidently
wished to impress upon me the larger importance of the value of the
social experiment which the Mormons had, to this time, so successfully
advanced.

"It would be a cruel waste of human effort," he said, "if, after having
attained comfort in these valleys--established our schools of art and
science--developed our country and founded our industries--we should
now be destroyed as a community, and the value of our experience lost to
the world. We have a right to survive. We have a duty to survive. It
would be to the profit of the nation that we should survive."

But in order to survive, it was necessary to obtain some immediate
mitigation of the enforcement of the laws against us. The manner in
which they were being enforced was making compromise impossible, and the