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This speech was delivered in the Provo Tabernacle on the evening of March 14, 1905, in the presence of upwards of two thousand five hundred people, and the report of it was taken by Mr. Arthur Winter. When the speech was first published in full in the Deseret Evening News of March 25, 1905, the following explanatory note preceded it by the writer:

A report of this speech in a local paper [the Salt Lake Tribune] contained many verbal inaccuracies and crudities which in many cases were the reporter's, not mine. It is too much to expect that extemporaneous speech will be free from verbal and rhetorical errors, and I do not claim that the speech as delivered at Provo was free from such defects. In the speech as here reported by Mr. Arthur Winter, some of these crudities have been eliminated so far as they could be and still retain the structure and spirit of what was said. One item has been added: a passage relating to the alleged threats against Gentile industries in the State of Utah.

Concerning the criticisms that have been made of this speech—one of which extended through seven columns of as vapid and flaccid an aggregation of words, words, words as it has ever been my lot to wade through—I only care to notice one, that is the alleged harshness of some of my utterances. The conclusion is reached that some of my words were unbecoming both my calling and the place in which they were delivered. In answer I only wish to say that the propriety of one's expressions is governed very largely by the task one has before him. Even the Son of God, when he had occasion to denounce falsehood and reprove deceivers, no longer used the gentle tones by which he comforted the sorrowful or encouraged those bowed down in weakness; but he used language suited to the task before him. To the scribes and Pharisees, who were hounding himself and his friends to their death, and as a preliminary to that purpose were seeking to embitter the minds of the populace, he said:

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but within ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the Prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the Prophets. Fill ye up, then, the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?"

I think I have not gone beyond this worthy example in anything I have said in this speech; and for the sacredness of the building in which my remarks were made, I in no way feel that there was a desecration, since when the task before one is to defend the innocent against misrepresentation, and denounce calumniators, then "all place a temple, and all seasons summer."