Less than two thousand years ago the great Roman republic was at the zenith of its power. Some of the free and enterprising citizens of that mighty land emigrated into the cold, mountainous regions of the north and established a colony which they called Beville. They set up the Roman standard, and claimed the territory in the name of their country.
After overcoming untold difficulties, they sent messengers to Rome asking for recognition; and saying that, inasmuch as they had given a grand, rich domain to their beloved mother land, they should be placed upon an equal footing with their free-born fellow-citizens. But the politicians at Rome would not listen to this request; and Beville was kept in the vassalage of a conquered province.
All the governors, judges and many of the local officers were sent from some other part of the republic; and they treated the people of Beville with the most dreadful severity, while they dispatched to Rome the most vicious and cruelly false reports concerning the honest citizens of the province or colony unto which they had been sent to govern and to judge. Many of them were most contemptible knaves and traitors. They once had a governor who traitorously violated his oath to give a certificate of election to a man who had one vote in a dozen, and whose only claim to consideration was his wealth and willingness to make loans on desperate political titles; a governor who deprived a good public unsectarian university of its needed support and then declared that the people of Beville opposed education; a governor who broke his plighted word in order that he might leave upon the fair land the espionage of an unjust and unaccountable commission; a governor who basely betrayed the consul that maintained him in office by saying with egotism which is bleached white with concentrated lye: "I wrote all of such and such portions of the consul's message;" a governor who was called a thief upon the floor of the Senate; a governor who had a list of wildcat, highway-robbery mining stocks which bore his name and title—all for sale under the glare and glamor of his civil position; a governor whose brains were rattling chestnuts, whose heart was infinitesimal, bearing proof that a single atom can exist, and whose beauty—his only virtue—was that of the painted harlot and the whitened sepulchre.
Then they had one judge, a man who should now be where Deacon Bitters was supposed to be years ago—measuring sulphur to make orthodox hell fire; a judge whose class-meeting morality was so dreadfully shocked by an advocate's grand conduct that the advocate was disbarred from practice because he refused to cast off and make a wanderer of the wife who had loved and honored him, and who had borne him sweet, confiding children; a judge who could then send lechers forth from his court crowned with bay and laurel and bearing their edicts of license in their hands; a judge who practically said to the libertine, "Go your way rejoicing. Prey upon virtue without stint. Bring ruin into your own home, and then spread disease and deadly desolation wherever else you can gain an entrance. You are free to come and go. My thunderbolts of justice, forged at the fire of fanaticism and fanned by the wind of protection for my own son, all these shafts are for our over-scrupulous opponents, the people of Beville;" a judge whose brain was honeycombed with the devious turnings of treacherous thoughts, whose heart was an icicle, and whose alleged moral desire—his only virtue—was the great enfolding cloak which could cover every prostitute and paramour in the land.
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They had another judge: a creature whose miserable physical appearance was but the photograph of the horrid, ugly soul within; a judge who was willing to slay women and children, and to tread over their corpses to gain his nomination; a judge who became known within one brief year as an infamous wretch, who practiced cruelty with most Satanic ingenuity; a judge whose brain was a tape-worm lie, with five hundred self-sustaining and specie-propagating joints. Whose heart was a pain in his stomach caused by a vacuum, and whose ability to sermonize, his only virtue, was an adulterous union of vanity and falsehood.
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These men were all traitors—traitors to God, to their country and to the parents who vainly tried to endow them with manhood.
But to-day we in Utah have a few traitors a little nearer home. There are men who say:
"I once loved the cause well enough to die for it; but now I hate the work and the people, because a leading man once did me an injury. I will become an informer."