interference in Cuban affairs. He was one of the leaders in Washington
of the first ill-fated "Insurgent Republican" movement against the
control of the Republican party by these same piratical "interests;" and
he was the only Republican Senator who stood to oppose them by voting
against the iniquitous Dingley tariff bill of 1897. He delivered the
speech of defiance at the Republican national convention of 1896, when
four "Silver Republican" Senators led their delegations out of that
convention in revolt. And by all these acts of independence he put
himself in opposition to the politicians of the Mormon Church, who were
allying themselves with Hanna and Aldrich, the sugar trust, the railroad
lobby, and the whole financial and commercial Plunderbund in politics
that has since come to be called "The System."

He returned to Utah to prevent the sale of a United States Senatorship
by the Mormon Church; and, though he was himself defeated for
re-election, he helped to hold the Utah legislature in a deadlock that
prevented the selection of a successor to his seat. He fought to compel
the leaders of the Church to fulfill the pledges which they had
authorized him to give in Washington when statehood was being obtained.
After his father's death, when these pledges began to be openly
violated, he directed his attack particularly against Joseph F. Smith,
the new President of the Church, who was principally responsible for the
Church's breach of public faith. Through the columns of the Salt Lake
Tribune he exposed the treasonable return to the practice of polygamy
which Joseph F. Smith had secretly authorized and encouraged. He opposed
the election of Apostle Reed Smoot to the United States Senate, as a
violation of the statehood pledges. He criticized the financial
absolutism of the Mormon Prophet, which Smith was establishing in
partnership with "the Plunderbund." He was finally excommunicated and
ostracized, by his father's successors in power, for championing the