Joseph F. Smith · 1898 April General Conference · 1898-04-08
Transcribed from the OCR of the official printed Conference Report of the Sixty-eighth Annual Conference (April 1898), scanned by the Church History Library and hosted at the Internet Archive (conferencereport1898a). OCR was cleaned and corrected: running heads, page numbers, and line-break hyphenation removed; obvious OCR errors fixed. Not yet proofread page-by-page against the scan images, so minor residual OCR errors may remain (status: draft, pending review).
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review: in-context proofread, synopsis/session-artifact cleanup, and spacing fixes. NOT a full page-by-page scan collation.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: collated against the IA djvu OCR (conferencereport1898a). Retitled from the mismatched 'Priesthood and Obedience' (this talk has nothing to do with priesthood or obedience) to 'The Saints a Charitable People', matching the printed subject list (removed as a leaked fragment from the body opening: 'The Saints a charitable people--Idleness and pauperism should not be fostered--Value of independence and industry'). Corrected session from Third Day Afternoon to Third Day Morning, and talk_order from 1 to 4 -- this talk immediately follows Jonathan G. Kimball's talk (1898-04-kimball-missionary-labors.md, order 3) and the session does not transition to afternoon ('2 p.m., the choir sang') until after this talk's own genuine close. Removed a large wrongly-appended block after that close -- choir/benediction session-housekeeping plus full Primary Association and Sunday School statistical reports for 1897, none of which are part of this discourse or are discourses themselves. Removed two mid-body running-head/page-number bleeds ('PRESIDENT JOSEPH F. SMPPH', '4S'). 0 QC ERRORs.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.