Governor West was succeeded in 1889 by A. L. Thomas, who soon announced himself as decidedly in favor of still further restricting government of the people, by the people, for the people, by recommending that more local officers should be appointed "by some federal agency," instead of continuing to be elected by the people.
The last eight, and especially the last six, years have been chiefly notorious for the outrageous and desperate attempts of the anti-Mormon party, through congressional legislation and the courts, to crush and destroy the church, and persecute, distress, and despoil the members thereof. The details are too profuse to be related here, and therefore must be referred to but briefly and mostly in a general way.
It seems to have been a settled leading idea of most, yet not quite all, of the federal officers appointed and sent to Utah, that the almost sole purpose of their appointment was to destroy the church as a religious body, and especially the political power of the members, and to despoil them in every possible way, preferably under some sort of color of law. A strange thing in a free country, in this much vaunted land of liberty and equal rights par excellence.
In regard to federal officials, or to officials appointed by "some federal agency," the usual course is to select and appoint those who are prejudiced and who cherish animosity against the Latter-day Saints, and who antagonize them on all possible occasions. If by any fortunate accident a fair-minded man is appointed, he is either so badgered and worried by the anti-Mormon element as to cause him to resign in disgust, or every effort is made to effect his early removal from office, so that the courts and all offices under federal or anti-Mormon influence become mere partisan machinery for oppressing and despoiling the Latter-day Saints.
The Utah Commission, that costly superfluity, which probably causes the country an expenditure of $50,000 per annum to enable the commission to supersede local self-government so far as it can, makes its annual report to the federal government in which one thing is surely manifest—the attempt to increase its own powers and to secure further legislation restrictive of the privileges, powers, rights, and liberties of the people. Under such circumstances the commission is entitled to no more respect than the law demands. There really never has been any more use for such a commission than for the fifth wheel to a wagon; not so much, for an extra wheel would come in useful if one of the four was broken, but the Utah Commission has been from the beginning absolutely of no necessity nor utility whatever. It has been an extravagant and criminal waste of the people's money, an excrescence on the body politic, a libel on popular government, a disgrace to American liberty. Some of the unrighteous decisions of the commission have been virtually reversed by the Supreme Court of the United States, though even that august tribunal can not be said to be forward in doing even and exact justice towards the Latter-day Saints. Indeed in all the courts under federal jurisdiction, or under anti-Mormon influence, the justice that is done to the Latter-day Saints is such as can hardly be avoided under the law, and even the law is frequently so one-sidedly construed and technically twisted and distorted as to become a mere mockery of justice, which, on the contrary, should be the foundation, spirit, substance, object, and end of all law.
Utah and Idaho are disgraced with religious test oaths, through federal and anti-Mormon agency. Arizona had such a law, but to her credit be it said that she repealed it, though some Mormon-eaters want another enacted. Nevada made a law disfranchising the Latter-day Saints, but the Supreme Court decided that it was unconstitutional. In Idaho a Latter-day Saint is debarred, because of his religion, from voting or holding office, and the new state constitution prohibits him from sitting on juries. In Utah the federally appointed judges have decided that an alien Latter-day Saint cannot be naturalized, solely on account of his religion. The appointment of the chief justice who concurred in that decision, was afterwards confirmed by the United States Senate, the Senate thus sanctioning persecution for religious and conscience' sake. The attempt is also made to prohibit even native-born Latter-day Saints from taking up land, and threats are freely made that disability to hold real estate will follow. Then perhaps the right to live will be denied, as in the case of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
The law known as the Poland bill gave federal and local agency equal power in arranging the jury list, but that show of justice is now gone, and all jurors are chosen by federal agency, resulting in jury lists and juries from which Latter-day Saints are excluded, so that they are tried, not by juries of their peers, but by juries of prejudiced, political and religious partisans and open and avowed enemies. What confidence can any man have in getting justice from a court where judge and juries and prosecuting and executive officers are well known to be unscrupulous partisans and bitter enemies of the accused?
Among the judicial infamies perpetrated against the Latter-day Saints was the diabolical Dickson-Zane doctrine of segregation, by which a man charged with a misdemeanor could be kept in prison all his life. This doctrine, as well as its near akin doctrine that the same misdemeanor could be divided into two or more offenses, with two or more different sentences of punishment, was overthrown by the Supreme Court of the United States.
In the administration of recent federal law, the courts in 1887 took possession of the Latter-day Saints' Perpetual Emigrating Fund, a charitable institution for the assistance of worthy emigrants, and seized real and personal estate belonging, or supposed to belong, to the Church, and estimated to be worth about a million dollars. Some of its own property was then rented to the Church, the federal agency requiring and receiving the rent. Now, if the federal government sets the demoralizing example of robbing the people of their property, what else can be expected than that the people will follow the example of the government and freely rob one another, until this will become a nation of sixty or a hundred million people, mostly thieves? If the Latter-day Saints are to be robbed, then why not the Catholics, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, or any other religious society? If any religious society, why not any civil society, until theft becomes common business throughout the land? For, do it under cover of law, or call it confiscation, or by any other name, it will smell as bad, it will still be theft in every essential element.
Much more might be said of the endless persecutive enormities perpetrated through federal agency toward the Latter-day Saints. But the subject grows with the handling, and time and space would fail for an adequate portrayal of the facts, the disfranchisement of all women, and of those men who had more than one wife; the numerous day and night raids of peaceable towns and settlements; the vexatious arrests; the frivolous and spiteful charges preferred; the outrageous bonds required in cases of misdemeanor, running from $1,000 to $10,000, and even to nearly $50,000; the multitude of convictions, numbering between one and two thousand, some without any and many with very slight evidence; the high penalties inflicted in most cases, with regrets at the inability of the court to inflict still higher; the dragging of delicate women into court and compelling them to testify against their husbands, and sending them to prison for refusal; deputy marshals with impunity shooting at and even killing men only charged with misdemeanor; straining the law so that a man could safely live in the same house with a whore, but not with his reputed wife, nor could hardly look over the fence at her house or her garden, or sit on the fence while she passed by; refusing to prosecute lewd and lascivious anti-Mormons, but imprisoning Latter-day Saints who informed on them; the voluntary exile for years of many who had no confidence in the justice of the courts; the enormous expense, amounting to millions of dollars, incurred, in one way or another, in these persecutive proceedings, all wrung from a sober, industrious, God-fearing, but abused, slandered, and persecuted community, and wholly, solely and entirely on account of their religion.