Elder Thomas D. Reese

(President of the Juab Stake of Zion)

I have been delighted with the spirit of the conference. It has thrilled me with the idea that our people are up-to-date in meeting the issues that stand before us. I have been impressed with the spirit that we, as a people, should be careful in our utterances, that we should use discretion and judgment in these days of feverish political excitement, and not stand at our back fence and quarrel with our neighbor over some things that probably little concern us. I have seen neighbors sometimes disputing and quarreling over men whom they will never see on this earth, save it be in the magazines, whose hand they will never clasp, and yet their brother across the fence, by some untimely misjudged statement, they offend, and there will be then in their hearts anger and sadness, and the Spirit of the Lord will not find free place in which to thrive.

In our stake, when I see men that become excited over politics, I have said that they are like some patients that I have had-when the fever gets to 105, I look for them to be delirious, and I pull out my thermometer and test their temperature. When it is 105 they ofttimes say things that they do not know that they are saying. So when I meet a brother who is radical and talking upon the street too loud, I reach for my thermometer, and if his political temperature is 105, I say, "Brother, you are delirious, you ought to go home for fear that somebody else will catch the contagion."

I was very much impressed with the remarks of Brother Lyman this morning, when he spoke of the tobacco question. He said that as a people we should hold out our hands and stay the evil, or any other evils that may be in our midst. I have thought of this very much in connection with a lesson that I learned in life when I was a young man attending college in the east.

In one of the big cities I had the privilege of studying in the anatomy room of the university with a great number of other students of the subject, and I was working along, doing some of the extra work to earn a little money to remain at college, and I had the duty of going down to the morgue and there looking over the bodies that were unclaimed, that no one knew, and from those unclaimed bodies the state in that section gave the college the permission to take for scientific investigation or into the anatomy room.

On one occasion, I stood there as the police force brought into the morgue a beautiful girl, seemingly, to look at her, and one of the men said, "This lady is a graduate from the slum, and we found her lifeless in the gutter."

That so impressed me that I became immediately interested in that lady, and letters were sent out all over the country, asking people to come and identify her, and it was not long before the advertisements from papers were being answered and letters were being answered from different police headquarters, asking about that young lady, and many a mother and many a father, and many a brother walked through that morgue to see if it were their daughter or sister, and O the expressions of sadness!

On one occasion there came an old lady, tottering upon her cane, and she was repeating as she came in the door, "Little Mary, I have found you; little Mary, I have found you." Some of the men escorted her up to the casket, but as she looked upon it she said, "No, no, not my little Mary-but somebody else's little Mary."

The words so impressed me that I thought, would it not have been right if some hand could have reached out and prevented this girl from destroying that beautiful body-because there was every mark upon it of dissipation, her arms had been pitted where she had used some of the vile and serious drugs that some people get in the habit of using. And I thought to myself, what right did that girl have to cause probably the sorrow that she must have caused somewhere to some home? And I thought of the words of the old lady, "Somebody's little Mary." There must have been hundreds of little Marys who had wandered away from their homes and forgotten to write back to father and mother, and caused them sorrow and anguish; had destroyed the body that they had received and that should have given to this earth again bodies.

And why are we so anxious to say to the boy, we are going to stop you from using tobacco, stop you from destroying your body? That is one of our missions, because, boy, your soul is greater, far greater, probably, than you understand. As Latter-day Saints, we understand that our boys and girls, who stand by our sides are our greatest wealth in this world and in the eternities. They will stand in the presence of God with us, as the riches above all riches that can be thought of in this earth, because we expect from that boy and girl that they will join in the perfection of godliness, and we expect, if they reach the perfection that the Savior spoke about, that they can in time stand out in the universe and create worlds like the one that we stand upon, with all the mountains and the valleys and the seas and the wealth that are in them. We hold that our boys' and our girls' souls are greater than the combined wealth of the world, if we can save them in godliness to our Father in heaven; and therefore we have a right to stay anything that will destroy their bodies, or lead them away from this, the work of the Lord.

And may God bless us, that we will understand this duty toward our boys and our girls and our neighbors, and that vile thoughts and anger and bitterness will not be a part of our lives, I ask in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Swanee Singers sang, "The Americans come."