The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1890-09-27
MAKE THEM TELL.

| If the Utah commission has reported to
the secretary of the interior that it has
evidence that forty, or any other number
of men in this territory, have violated the
anti polygamy laws of the country within
year, we hold it to be the duty of the
grand jury to summon the members of the
commission before the inquisitorial body
and compel them to disclose that evidence
The marshal and his deputies are working
early and late, and employing more or less
shrewdness to discover just little of the
testimony with which the commission
claims to be so well supplied. Just one case
OF a polygamous marriage within year
would be God send 10 the marshal's Of
flee. The deputy who will dig up or dis
4 cover probable case may be certain of a
reward, and a conviction would make him
hero in and out of federal court circles.
We believe that the marshal would so
highly value genuine. live case of modern
polygamy that he would pay handsomely
for one and for forty cases he would be
willing to surrender quarters salary and
fees,
Anybody who knows the commissioners
and is at all familiar with their insane de-
sire to do something that will operate iniu-
riously to the Mormons, will smile at this
suggestion that evidence exists of the pc
lyaamous marriage of forty Mcrmons. If
there were any such evidence the gentle
men would not content themselves with
intimations regarding it. Rather would
they endanger their necks in their mad
haste to reach court and set officers on
the trail of the violators of the law. Even
withered and shrunken WILLIAMS, with SC
little life in him that he exists in perpetual
doubt as to his ability to pump enough OF
breath to last him a week, would
find strength to reach the marshal's
office and spread before that official evidence
of man committing polygamy. Imagine
such pronounced and confessed anti-Mor-
mons as GODFREY, ROBERTSON and SAUN-
DERs nursing information which would
send forty Mormons to the penitentiary for
five years Can anyone conceive the prob
ability of such thing. If so, he can think
of a cat turning from milk and ducks cut
ting the webs of their feet and going inland
to pick with the chickens.
The fact is, the commission has no evi-
! dence of single polygamous marriage hay
ing been celebrated within year, or with.
in three years, for that matter Some of
its disreputable tools and agents may have
said that in their opinion certain men had
violated the anti polygamy laws, and that
is the extent of the commissions evidence
that the law has been violated. To say
that such expressions of belief are evil
dence is to make light of
the law and to trihe with the
credulity of men. Especially is this so
when the character of some of the fellows
employed by the commission for election
work is taken into account; that for
instance of the late Judge of e.ec-
ton in the Fourth precinct who
threw up his employment as bar
keeper and took the first train out of town
after the federal judge had called in the
grand jury and given it special instructions
to investigate his manipulation of ballots.
Perhaps ALLEN told the commission that
he believed the Mormons whose ballots he
changed for Liberal ones were guilty of
poygamy.
We say the inquisitors should call the
gentlemen of the commission in and force
them to tell what they know, or admit that
they have been guilty of maliciously circu-
lating falsehoods.