The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1899-01-19
SWEEPING CHARGES.

For weeks the organ of the Rising
Storm has been proclaiming to tn world
that Utah is a land of defiant law
breakers and pledge breakers.
These irrational and manifestly ma
licious statements are not borne out by
the facts. In no state of the Union
have merchants and business men bet
ter credit. Nowhere are the people so
prompt in paying their obligations.
Their word is their bond. And eastern
capitalists so regard it.
In creating its storm OF adverse SEN
timent, the organ has given out the i'm
preston that the people of Utah are
lawless and immoral set.
Nothing could be farther from the
truth. Aside from a single institution
which, during half century of reli-
gious sanction obtained a foothold,
that no reasonable man ever believed
could be shaken loose at once the peo-
pie of Utah, those of the dominant
church. are upright, moral, self-re-
speeding, peace-loving and law-abiding.
That the old relations would run their
course shat men would continued to be
men, and that human nature would not
change in a decade, or even in two, was
an admission that common sense and
practical observation has made, at
least up to the recent state campaign.
All through that contest, and fire.
quently since its close, the organ whose
mission seems TO be the starting Of
storms OF prejudice and the spreading
where it is most likely to injure the
people and the state, declared that
plural marriages are still being con-
tracted in. the Mormon church, in spite
Of their prohibition by the manifesto
and the oft-repeated denials of the
church authorities.
When asked for the proof of this Sc
rious charge, one is always put aside
with the petulant remark: We know
it is so, and that is enough"
Yesterday it reiterated the unsup-
ported assertion with which it has
caused most of the iU-feeling and hos
tility in the east, which it likens to "a
rising storm" 1t said:
AS the days and weeks go by, other
facts are developing. There have been
against the plighted faith of the
dominant church and the Mormon peo-
PIE, other polygamous marriages or
other celestial sealings, or some cere- !
n1ony which results in this world the
same as polygamous marriages re-
sui"
Formerly President Snow was ex-
cepted from its sweeping declarations |
Of Mormon insincerity, duplicity and |
immortality. But the other day it in |
simulated that there are evidences of his |
Misunderstanding with the government, |
similar TO those it has caricatured for |
campaign purposes.
The people of the state are entitled I
to fair treatment. If the organ has |
proofs OF plural marriages contracted /
since statehood, it should trot them
out. If the proofs are not available, it |
should mention names, at least. The /
general charge it makes includes every 4
meSnber Of the dominant church. It 1
calls upon them to suppress the prac-
tice and yet it falsely accuses them of
continuing it If the contracting of
plural marriages is followed today at
all, which we doubt, even the organ
win not pretend that every church
member is entering into such contracts.
But the organ neither gives the inno-
cent a charge to establish their own
innocence or to rebuke the guilty.
It's whole course is so unfair and so
tainted with vipdictiveness that the
injury of the state in order to injure a
sect seems to be the only object of the
storn-starter: unless of course, there
was a secondary. design to create a
clamorous demand for a storm-stopper.