At the inception of plural marriage among the Latter-day Saints,
there was no law, national or state, against its practise. This
statement assumes, as granted, a distinction between bigamy and
the "Mormon" institution of plural marriage. In 1862, a law was
enacted with the purpose of suppressing plural marriage, and, as
had been predicted in the national Senate prior to its passage,
it lay for many years a dead letter. Federal judges and United
States attorneys in Utah, who were not "Mormons" nor lovers of
"Mormonism," refused to entertain complaints or prosecute cases
under the law, because of its manifest injustice and inadequacy.
But other laws followed, most of which, as the Latter-day Saints
believe, were aimed directly at their religious conception of the
marriage contract, and not at social impropriety nor sexual
offense.

At last the Edmunds-Tucker act took effect, making not the
marriage alone but the subsequent acknowledging of the contract
an offense punishable by fine or imprisonment or both. Under the
spell of unrighteous zeal, the federal judiciary of Utah
announced and practised that most infamous doctrine of
segregation of offenses with accumulating penalties.

I who write have listened to judges instructing grand juries in
such terms as these: that although the law of Congress designated
as an offense the acknowledging of more living wives than one by
any man, and prescribed a penalty therefor, as Congress had not
specified the length of time during which this unlawful
acknowledging must continue to constitute the offense, grand
juries might indict separately for every day of the period during