No advantage of this kind can be claimed for the Sunday laws in our Eastern and Southern States. It is certainly desirable to have one day a week of rest from labour and business; but it is equally true that a man"s ploughing his field or weeding his garden does not infringe on the liberty of his neighbours, diminish their security of person and property, or encourage their vicious propensities, even on Sunday. It is setting a bad example to break any law; but I do not think that any citizen of Ma.s.sachusetts was seriously corrupted by resisting the Fugitive Slave Act; and I doubt if any Vermonter was morally the worse for breaking the law in that State against Sunday "visits from house to house, except from motives of humanity or charity, or for moral and religious edification." It is better to have the laws obeyed intelligently than blindly; and those really worthy of respect would have more authority if every prohibition which is never enforced, except out of malice, were repealed. Much aid is given to morality by such religious observances as are voluntary and conscientious; but compulsory observance breeds both slaves and rebels.
How far our Sunday laws are meant to encourage the peculiar usages of the popular sects is seen in the fact that, since 1877, about 150 professed Christians, who had kept the Sabbath on the day set apart in the Bible, were arrested on the charge of having profaned Sunday by such actions as ploughing a retired field, weeding a garden, cutting wood needed for immediate use, or making a dress. They refused to pay any fine; most of them were imprisoned accordingly; in one case the confinement lasted 129 days; two deaths were hastened by incarceration; and in the summer of 1895 eight of these "Sat.u.r.darians," as they were nicknamed, were working in a chain-gang on the roads in Tennessee. One of the eight was a clergyman. Among the commonwealths which prosecuted observers of the original Sabbath as Sabbath-breakers were Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ma.s.sachusetts, and seven other States. Such prosecutions were too much like persecutions; for people who kept neither Sat.u.r.day nor Sunday were not so much molested. If the Sunday laws were really meant for the public welfare, every citizen would be allowed to choose his own Sabbath, and no one who kept Sat.u.r.day sacred would be required to rest on Sunday also. Such liberal legislation has actually been pa.s.sed by Rhode Island and many other States.
How strict the law is against doing business on Sunday may be judged from the fact that in 1896 a decrepit old woman was sent to jail in New York City for selling a couple of bananas, and a boy of fifteen was arrested for selling five cents" worth of coal in January. Three men were fined for selling umbrellas in the street on a rainy Sunday in 1895, and others were arrested for selling five cents" worth of ice.
People who have no refrigerators suffer under the difficulty of buying ice, fruit, and meat on a hot Sunday in our Eastern cities.
Sunday laws and customs differ so widely in our various States, that they cannot all be wise and just. Rest from labour and business is secured in Southern California, without State legislation, by the action of public opinion; and were this to become too weak, it would be reinforced by the trades-unions. Personal liberty is not necessarily violated by laws prohibiting disturbance of public worship; but it would be if anyone were compelled to testify in court, or sit on the jury, or do any other business elsewhere, on any day set apart for rest by his conscience and religion. There seems to be little necessity for other legislation, except under peculiar local circ.u.mstances to which town and city magistrates are better able than members of State and national legislatures to do justice. The question, what places of business that have no vicious tendencies ought to be allowed to open on Sunday, might settle itself, as does the question how early they are to close on other days of the week. There needs no law to prevent business being done at night. Stores which could offer nothing that many people need to buy on Sunday, would have so few customers that the proprietors could ill afford to open their doors. Where the demand is as great and innocent as it is for fresh meat and fruit in hot weather, the interest of the proprietor is no more plain than is the duty of the legislator and magistrate. People employed in hotels, stables, telegraph offices, libraries, museums, and parks, can, of course, protect themselves from overwork, as domestic servants do, by stipulating for holidays and half-holidays.
Whatever may be the gain to public health from cessation of labour and business on Sunday, there is no such advantage, but rather injury, from the prohibition of healthy recreations and amus.e.m.e.nts, which are acknowledged to be perfectly innocent on at least six days of the week.
Sunday is by no means so strictly observed, especially in this respect, on the continent of Europe as in the United States. Sabbatarianism is peculiarly an American and British inst.i.tution; and this fact justifies the position that it is by no means a necessary condition of the security, or even the welfare, of civilised nations. If our Sunday laws cannot be proved to be necessary, they must be admitted to be oppressive. Over-taxation is but a slight grievance compared with the tyranny of sending men and women to jail for inability or unwillingness to pay the fines imposed in 1895 by the State of Tennessee for working on their farms, or in Ma.s.sachusetts soon after for playing cards in their own rooms. Further consideration of the question, what amus.e.m.e.nts should be permitted on Sunday, will be found in an appendix.
Such problems are peculiarly unfit for treatment by our central Government. Its chief duty, of course, is protection of our people against invasion and rebellion; and the authority of the President and Congress ought not to be weakened by vain attempts to settle disputes which would be dealt with much more satisfactorily by the cities and towns. A Sunday law too lax for Pennsylvania might be too strict for California. The system of post-offices is too well adapted for the general welfare to be given up hastily; but the Government ought to surrender the monopoly which now makes it almost impossible for citizens to free themselves from dependence on disobliging or incompetent postmasters. I have nothing to say against the Census, Education, Health, and Patent Bureaus, nor against the Smithsonian Museum, except that our citizens have a right to use their own property as freely on Sunday as on any other day of the week. I do not see why our Government should have more than that of other nations to do with the issue of paper money; but I leave the bank question to abler pens.
The tariff is a much plainer issue. We are told in _Social Statics_ that "A government trenches upon men"s liberties of action" in obstructing commercial intercourse; "and by so doing directly reverses its function.
To secure for each man the fullest freedom to exercise his faculties, compatible with the like freedom of all others, we find to be the state"s duty. Now trade-prohibitions and trade-restrictions not only do not secure this freedom, but they take it away, so that in enforcing them the state is transformed from a maintainer of rights into a violator of rights." The obstacles to importation deliberately set up by American tariffs, indirectly check exportation; for unwillingness to buy from any other nation diminishes not only its willingness but its ability to buy our products in return. The United States are actually exporting large amounts of cattle, wheat, and cotton, as well as of boots and shoes, agricultural implements, steel rails, hardware, watches, and cotton cloth. These commodities are produced by Americans who can defy foreign compet.i.tion. In some cases the tariff enables them to raise their prices at home, to the loss of their fellow-citizens.
Prices abroad cannot be raised by our Government. What it can and does do is to burden both farms and factories by duties on lumber, gla.s.s, coal, wool, woollen goods, and many other imports. The rates are arranged with a view to increase, not individual liberty or public security, but the profits of managers of enterprises which would not pay without such help. Men who are carrying on profitable industries have to make up part of what is lost in unprofitable ones. In fact, the cost of living is increased needlessly for all our citizens, except the privileged few.
There would be less injustice in aiding new enterprises by bounties; but the proper authorities to decide how much money should be voted for such purposes are the cities and towns. Some of the makers of our national Const.i.tution wished to make tariff legislation in Congress impossible except by a majority of two-thirds; and this might properly be required for all measures not planned in behalf of individual liberty or the public safety. Much of the business now done by the nation ought to be transferred to the States. They took the lead between 1830 and 1870 in improving rivers and harbours, building railroads, and digging ca.n.a.ls.
The result of transferring such work to Congress was that in 1890 it voted $25,000,000 to carry on 435 undertakings, more than one-fourth of which had been judged unnecessary by engineers. Two years later, four times as many new jobs were voted as had been recommended by the House committee. Among these plans was one, in regard to the Hudson River, which was the proper business of the State of New York. The extravagance of our pension system is notorious. If the restriction proposed by Spencer is applicable anywhere, it is to central rather than local governments.
VIII. Great as are the evils of unnecessary laws, Spencer"s remedy is too sweeping to be universally supported by evolutionists. Huxley protests against it as "administrative Nihilism," and declares that if his next-door neighbour is allowed to bring up children "untaught and untrained to earn their living, he is doing his best to restrict my freedom, by increasing the burden of taxation for the support of gaols and workhouses which I have to pay." His conclusion is that "No limit is or can be theoretically set to state interference." The impossibility of drawing "a hard and fast line" is admitted even by so extreme an individualist as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, who complains that "Crimes go unpunished in England," while the "Great National Pickpocket" is busy "reading through all the comedies and burlesques brought out in the theatres," "running after little boys who dare to play pitch-farthing,"
or "going on sledging expeditions to the North Pole."
Lecky agrees so far with Spencer and Mill as to say, in _Democracy and Liberty_, that punishment should "be confined, as a general rule, to acts which are directly injurious to others," and accordingly that "With Sunday amus.e.m.e.nts in private life, the legislator should have no concern." As a check to over-legislation, he recommends biennial sessions, instead of annual; and he protests against the despotism of trades-unions. His strongest point against Spencer is that sanitary legislation has added several years to the average length of life in England and Wales, prevented more than eighty thousand deaths there in a single year, and actually reduced the death-rate of the army in India by more than four-fifths.
IX. Spencer has succeeded in increasing the number of individualists so much, that Donisthorpe says they can be counted by the thousand, though there were scarcely enough in 1875 in England to fill an omnibus.
Transcendentalism had made individualism comparatively common long before in America. The principle of not interfering with other people, except to prevent their wronging us, is fully applicable, as Spencer says, to the relation of husband with wife, and also to that of parent and teacher with child. It could also be followed with great advantage in the case of domestic servants. There can be no doubt of the correctness of the position, taken in the _Principles of Sociology_, that delight in war has a tendency to stifle love of liberty. Sparta, Russia, and the new German Empire show that where the ideal of a nation is military glory, "The individual is owned by the State." The citizens are so graded, that "All are masters of those below and subjects of those above." The workers must live for the benefit of the fighters, and both be controlled closely by the government. Armies flourish on the decay of individual rights. How difficult it was to avoid this, during some b.l.o.o.d.y years, even in America, has been shown in Chapter IV. A nation of shopkeepers is better fitted than a nation of soldiers to develop free inst.i.tutions.
One of Spencer"s objections to Socialism is that it would "end in military despotism." Nothing else could replace compet.i.tion so far as to keep a nation industrious. Spencer is right in saying, "Benefit and worth must vary together," which means that wages and salaries should correspond to value of work. Otherwise, "The society decays from increase of its least worthy members and decrease of its most worthy members."
These facts are so generally known already, that there is less danger than is thought by Spencer, of either the national establishment of Socialism or of a ruinous extension of governmental interference.
The average American is altogether too willing to have his wealthy neighbours taxed for his own benefit; but he knows that he can make himself and his family more comfortable by his own exertions than his poor neighbours are; and he is not going to let any government forbid his doing so. He does not object to public libraries, and perhaps would not to free theatres; but he would vote down any plan which would prevent his using his money and time to his own greatest advantage. He is sometimes misled by plausible excuses for wasting public money, and arresting innocent people; but he insists on at least some better pretext than was made for the old-fashioned meddling with food, clothing, business, and religion. He may not call himself an individualist; but he will never practise Socialism.
This sort of man is already predominant in Great Britain, as well as in America; and multiplication of the type elsewhere is fostered by mighty tendencies. The duty of treating every form of religion according to ethical and not theological standards is rapidly becoming the practice of all civilised governments; and persecution is peculiar to Turkey and Russia. These two despotisms form, with Germany, the princ.i.p.al exceptions to the rule that political liberty is on the increase throughout Europe, especially in the form of local self-government. The nineteenth century has made even the poorest people more secure than ever before from oppression and lawless violence, as well as from pestilence and famine. Dest.i.tution is relieved more amply and wisely, while industry and intelligence are encouraged by opportunity to enjoy comforts and luxuries once almost or altogether out of the reach of monarchs. The fetters formerly laid on trade of cities with their own suburbs have been broken; and the examples of Great Britain and New South Wales are proving that nations profit more by helping than hindering one another in the broad paths of commerce. Industrial efficiency has certainly been much promoted by the tendency, not only of scientific education but of manual training, to subst.i.tute knowledge of realities for quarrels about abstractions. All these changes favour the extension of free inst.i.tutions and also of individual liberty, wherever peace can be maintained. Industrial nations gain more than warlike ones by encouraging intellectual independence; but the general advantage is great enough to ensure the final triumph of liberty.
APPENDIX: SUNDAY RECREATION
THIS is much more common in New England and Great Britain than it was in the eighteenth century. The dinner has become the best, instead of the worst in the week. Scarcely anyone rises early; and n.o.body is shocked at reading novels. There is an enormous circulation in both English and American cities of Sunday papers whose aim is simply amus.e.m.e.nt. There is plenty of lively music in the parlours, as well as of merry talk in which clergymen are ready to lead. People who have comfortable homes can easily make Sunday the pleasant-est day of the week.
For people who cannot get much recreation at home, there are increasing opportunities to go to concerts, picture-galleries, and museums. Among the reading-rooms thrown open on Sunday in America about 1870 was that of the Boston Public Library; and no difference is now made in this great inst.i.tution among the seven days, except that more children"s books and magazines are accessible on Sunday. What important museums are now open in London, Boston, and New York have been already mentioned in Chapter VI. These opportunities are still limited; but there is no obstacle, except that of bad weather, to excursions on foot or bicycle, behind horse or locomotive, in electric car or steamboat, to beaches, ponds, and other places of amus.e.m.e.nt. The public parks are crowded all day long in summer; and people who go to church in the morning have no scruple about walking or riding for pleasure in the afternoon. These practices were expressly sanctioned by Ma.s.sachusetts in 1887, and by New Jersey in 1893; and the old law against Sunday visiting has been repealed since 1880 in Vermont.
The newer States have taken care not to pa.s.s such absurd statutes. I believe that the majority of our people were willing, as for instance was that prominent Episcopalian, Bishop Potter, to have the Chicago Exposition open on Sundays. Theatres and baseball grounds attract crowds of visitors in our cities, especially those west of the Alleghanies.
Whatever changes are made in the East will probably be in the direction of greater liberty. The only question is how fast the present opportunities of recreation ought to be increased.
No one would now agree with Dr. Chalmers in calling the Sabbath "an expedient for pacifying the jealousies of a G.o.d of vengeance." Good people have ceased to think, as the Puritans did, that "Pleasures are most carefully to be avoided" on every day of the week, or that "Amity to ourselves is enmity against G.o.d." Preachers no longer recommend "abstaining not only from unlawful pleasures, but also from lawful delights." Popular clergymen now say with Dr. Bellows: "Amus.e.m.e.nt is not only a privilege but a duty, indispensable to health of body and mind, and essential even to the best development of religion itself." "I put amus.e.m.e.nt among the necessaries and not the luxuries of life." "It is as good a friend to the church as to the theatre, to sound morals and unsuperst.i.tious piety as to health and happiness,... an interest of society which the religious cla.s.s instead of regarding with hostility and jealousy, ought to encourage and direct." "There is hardly a more baleful error in the world than that which has produced the feud between morality and amus.e.m.e.nt, piety and pleasure."
The fact is that pleasure means health. As I have said in a newspaper ent.i.tled _The Index_: "It is a violation of the laws of health for anyone, not absolutely bed-ridden or crushed by fatigue, to spend thirty-six hours without some active exercise in the open air. Trying to take enough on Sat.u.r.day to last until Monday, is dangerous, and most people have little chance for healthy exercise except on Sunday. The poor, ignorant girl who has had no fresh air for six days ought to be encouraged to take it freely on the seventh. And we all need our daily exercise just as much as our regular food and sleep. The two thousand delegates who asked, in behalf of ninety thousand working men, in 1853, to have the Crystal Palace open on Sundays, were right in declaring that "Physical recreation is as necessary to the working man as food and drink on the Sabbath." The fact is that pleasure is naturally healthy even when not involving active exercise. Dark thoughts breed disease like dark rooms. The man who never laughs has something wrong about his digestion or his conscience. Herbert Spencer has proved that our pleasant actions are beneficial, while painful ones are injurious both to ourselves and to our race. (_Principles of Psychology_, vol. i., pp.
278-286; Am. Ed.). Thus Sunday amus.e.m.e.nts are needed for the general health.
"They are also necessary for the preservation of morality. This consists in performing the actions which benefit ourselves and our neighbours, in other words, pleasant ones, and abstaining from whatever is painful and injurious. It is only in exceptional cases that we can make others happy by suffering pain ourselves. Now and then the paths of virtue and pleasure diverge; but they always come together again. As a rule, they traverse precisely the same ground and in exactly the same direction.
This is very fortunate; for if pleasure were always vicious, virtue would be hateful and impossible. The most blessed of all peacemakers is he who keeps virtue and pleasure from falling out. There is no better text than that which the little girl said she had learned at Sunday-school: "Chain up a child and away she will go!" Even so strict a man as Dr. Johnson said: "I am a great friend to public amus.e.m.e.nts, for they keep people from vice." Is there no need of them on the day when there is more drinking, gambling, and other gross vice than on any other? Need I say what day keeps our policemen and criminal courts most busy, or crowds our hospitals with sufferers from riotous brawls?
Has not the experience of two hundred and fifty years justified those English statesmen who showed themselves much wiser than their Puritan contemporaries in recommending archery, dancing, and other diversions on Sunday, because forbidding them "sets up filthy tippling and drunkenness?" To keep a man who does not care to go to church from getting any amus.e.m.e.nt, is to push him towards the saloon. And not only the laws against liquor selling, but others even more necessary for our safety, would be much better enforced if we did not encourage lawlessness by keeping up statutes which our best men and women violate without scruple and with impunity, or which actually prevent good people from taking such recreation as they know they ought to have. Outgrown ordinances should not be suffered to drag just and necessary laws down into contempt. "n.o.body wants to revive those old laws of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay which forbade people to wear lace, or buy foreign fruit, or charge more than a fixed price for a day"s work. No more Quakers will ever swing from a Boston gallows merely for preaching. But our laws against Sunday amus.e.m.e.nts are in the same spirit as that which hung Mary Dyer.
In old times, government kept continually telling people what to do, and took especial pains to make them go to church on Sunday. If they stayed away, they were fined; if they did not become members, they were not allowed to vote; if they got up rival services, they were hung; if they took any amus.e.m.e.nt on Sunday, they were whipped. All four cla.s.ses of laws for the same unjust end have pa.s.sed away, except that against Sunday recreation. This still survives in a modified form. But even in this shape it is utterly irreconcilable with the fundamental principles of our government. All American legislation, from the Declaration of Independence, rests on the great truth that our government is founded in order to secure us in our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our State is a limited partnership for mutual protection. We carry it on in order to make our freedom more complete; and we tolerate no restrictions on ourselves except such as are necessary conditions of the greatest possible liberty. These principles are already fully acknowledged on six days of the week, but only partly on the seventh. Still, there is a growing recognition of the likeness between laws against Sunday amus.e.m.e.nts and such prohibitions of eating meat in Lent as once caused people to be burned alive."
A weekly day of rest is a blessing; but David Swing is right in saying that "Absolute rest, perfectly satisfactory to horse and dog, is not adequate to the high nature of man." Complete torpor of mind and body is more characteristic of a Hindoo fakir than of a Christian saint. Should those who wish to rest as much as possible on Sunday sleep in church?
There is nothing irreligious in fresh air. The tendency of outdoor exercise to purify and elevate our thoughts is so strong that Kingsley actually defended playing cricket on Sunday as "a carrying out of the divineness of the Sabbath." If there is no hostility between religion and amus.e.m.e.nt on six days of the week, there cannot be much on the seventh.
No Protestants are more religious than the Swedes and Norwegians.
Everybody goes to church; there is theological teaching in the public-schools; and advocacy of liberal religious views was punished in 1888 with imprisonment. No Scandinavian objects, so far as I know, to indoor games, croquet, dancing, or going to the theatre on Sunday; and these amus.e.m.e.nts are acknowledged to be perfectly proper throughout continental Europe. No one who allows himself any exercise or recreation on Sunday has a right to say that his neighbours do not need more than he does. Lyman Beecher could not preach his best on any day when he did not work hard at sawing wood or shovelling sand in his cellar. There would be less dyspepsia on Monday if there were more exercise on Sunday.
Herbert Spencer tells us that "Happiness is the most powerful of tonics. By accelerating the circulation of the blood, it facilitates the performance of every function; and so tends alike to increase health where it exists, and to restore it when it has been lost. Hence the essential superiority of play to gymnastics."
A Bible Dancing Cla.s.s is said to have been organised, in deference to such facts, in New Jersey by an Episcopalian pastor, who perhaps wishes to accomplish Jeremiah"s prediction of the Messianic kingdom, "Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance." Among other liberal clergymen is Brooke Herford, who says: "We want Sunday to be the happiest day in all the week. Keep it free from labour, but free for all quiet, innocent recreations." Rev. Charles Voysey wrote me in 1887, lamenting the immorality arising "from the curse of having nothing to do or nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons and evenings." "Young persons especially," he said, "would be better, and morally more safe, for greater opportunities of innocent pleasure and games at the hours of enforced idleness on the Sunday."
The spirit of the legislators is changing like that of the clergy. The first laws against Sunday amus.e.m.e.nt were pa.s.sed by men who thought all pleasure vicious on every day of the week. Our present statutes are kept in force by people who like amus.e.m.e.nt, and get all they want of it; but who make it almost impossible for their poor neighbours, in order to conciliate ecclesiastical prejudice. "They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne and lay them on men"s shoulders"; but they themselves do not feel the weight.
Whatever may be the advantage of keeping Sunday, it cannot be kept religiously when it is kept compulsorily. Rest from unnecessary labour and business on one day every week may be for the public welfare; but this rest is not made more secure by indiscriminate prohibitions of amus.e.m.e.nt. The idlest man is the most easily tempted to disturb his neighbours. No man"s property is more safe or his personal liberty more secure because his neighbours are liable to be fined for playing golf.
Laws against Sunday recreation do not protect but violate individual liberty. A free government has no business to interfere with the right of the citizens to take healthy exercise and innocent amus.e.m.e.nt whenever they choose.
These considerations would justify a protest, not only against the Sunday laws made by Congress for the District of Columbia, but also against the statutes of every State in the Union, except Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, and Wyoming. "Whoever is present at any sport, game, play, or public diversion, except a concert of sacred music, or an entertainment given by a religious or charitable society, the proceeds of which, if any, are to be devoted exclusively to a religious or charitable purpose," on what is called "the Lord"s day"
in Ma.s.sachusetts is liable to a fine of five dollars; the penalty for taking part may be fifty dollars; and the proprietor or manager may be fined as much as five hundred dollars. New Jersey still keeps her old law against "singing, fiddling, or other music for the sake of merriment"; and express prohibitions of "any sport" are still maintained by Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island. Prominent among other States which forbid amus.e.m.e.nts acknowledged innocent on six days of the week, are New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Many of our States show particular hostility to card-playing, dancing, and theatre-going. The fact that fishing was practised by some of the Apostles on Sunday has not saved this quiet recreation from being prohibited by more than twenty commonwealths.
If every Sunday law were a dead letter, it ought to be repealed, because it tends to bring needed laws into contempt; but among recent results of Sunday legislation are the following. In 1876 some children were fined for playing ball in Rhode Island; so, about this time, in Ma.s.sachusetts, were a boy for skating, a young man for playing lawn-tennis, and a merchant for fishing with his little son. In 1894 two men were fined $10 each for playing golf on a lonely hill, in the commonwealth just mentioned; five boys under fifteen arrested for playing marbles in New York City; and every member of a baseball club in Pennsylvania fined. In 1895 a man and a boy of fifteen were fined $20 each for fishing in New York; and the attempt of some clergymen, aided by police, to break up a show in Missouri, caused a tumult in which men"s heads were broken by clubs, while women and children were trampled underfoot. On the first Sunday that the London galleries and museums were thrown open to their owners, May 24, 1896, two men were shot dead in Attleboro, Ma.s.s., by a policeman who had been ordered to break up a clambake. In that same year and State, a manager was fined $70 for allowing _Yankee Doodle_ to be performed in the Boston Theatre; three men were arrested for bowling; half a dozen Jews who had been playing cards in a private house were fined $10 or $20 each, and those who could not pay were sent to jail.
Among the Sabbath-breakers arrested in 1897 were a number of newsboys at the national capital, nine golfers in Ma.s.sachusetts, a young man for holding one end of a rope over which some little girls were skipping in New York City, and also the manager of a show in New Jersey, who spent ten days in jail. Fines were levied in 1898 for playing golf in Connecticut, and twenty-five fishermen were arrested on one Sunday in Buffalo, N. Y. Such are the risks which still accompany innocent and healthy amus.e.m.e.nts in the Eastern States. Many such arrests are made in order to collect fees, or gratify malice; and neither motive ought to be encouraged by the friends of religion.
Some magistrates in Long Island, N. Y., are believed, while still holding that baseball breaks the Sabbath, to have discovered that golf does not. It is further said that on July 9, 1899, some baseball men who had been playing a Sunday game to a large crowd saved themselves from arrest by using their bats and b.a.l.l.s to imitate golfing as soon as a policeman appeared in their grounds.
None of the Sunday laws is so mischievous as the decree of Mrs. Grundy against all forms of recreation not practised by the wealthy and fashionable. These people have so much time on six days of the week for active outdoor sport and indoor public entertainments, that they make little attempt to indulge in such recreations on Sunday. People who have only this one chance of playing ball, or dancing, or going to stereopticon lectures, concerts, and operas, suffer in health by having these recreations made unpopular as well as illegal. The climate of New England and New York, as well as of Great Britain and Canada, has unfortunately been so arranged that there are a great many cold and rainy Sundays, when much time cannot be spent pleasantly in walking or riding. This matters little to people who get all the amus.e.m.e.nt they want in their parlours. But what becomes of people who have no parlours?
For instance, of servant-girls who have no place where they can sing or even laugh? Shop-girls and factory-girls find their little rooms, Sunday after Sunday, too much like prisons. Young men are perhaps even more unfortunate; for they go to the saloon, though this is often closed without any better place of amus.e.m.e.nt being opened. Why should every week in a democratic country begin with an aristocratic Sunday, a day whose pleasures are mainly for the rich?
Libraries and museums are blessed places of refuge; but "What are they among so many?" The residents of the District of Columbia are particularly unfortunate, as the Smithsonian Museum, National Library, and other buildings, which are open during six days, are kept shut on Sunday. Congress seems to be of the opinion that working people need no knowledge of natural history, except what they can get from sermons about Jonah"s whale and Noah"s ark. Washington is not the only city whose rich men ought to remember the warning of Heber Newton: "Everything that tends to foster among our working people the notion of cla.s.s privilege is making against the truest morality in our midst.
As they look upon the case, it is the wealthy people, whose homes are private libraries and galleries of art, who protest against the opening of our libraries and museums to those who can afford no libraries and buy no pictures. Sabbatarianism is building very dangerous fires to-day."
We should all be glad to have more intellectual culture given on Sunday. One way of giving it would be for the churches to open public reading-rooms in the afternoon. This would be decidedly for their own interest; and so would be delivery of evening lectures on history, biography, and literature. The Sunday-schools in England found it necessary, even as late as 1850, to give much time to teaching reading and writing as well as the higher branches. Sunday-school rooms in America, which now are left useless after Sunday noon, might be employed in teaching English to German, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants during the afternoon and evening. Cla.s.ses might also be formed in vocal music, light gymnastics, American and English history and literature, physiology, sociology, and political economy. Such changes would make our churches all the more worthy of the founder, who "went about doing good."
The observance of Sunday as a day of rest from labour and business will be all the more popular as it is made precious to irreligious people.
They are numerous enough to have a right to ask that the public school-houses be opened for free cla.s.ses in French, German, drawing, and modelling; botany, chemistry, and bird-lore; cooking, sewing, and wood-work. If teachers of these branches were employed on Sunday by our cities, less money would be needed for police. Our industrial interests would certainly gain by having this system carried out as far, for instance, as is done by Lyons and Milan, which have special Sunday-schools for teaching weaving. Goldsmiths are instructed by similar schools in Austria, and blacksmiths in Saxony. The full advantage of Sunday cla.s.ses of the various kinds here suggested might not perhaps be seen until a taste for them could be made general, but doing this would go far to diminish the taste for saloons.
The first step, however, which ought to be taken by our legislatures is the repeal of all laws hindering the sale of tickets on Sunday to exhibitions of pictures or curiosities, concerts, stereopticon lectures, or other instructive entertainments which are acknowledged inoffensive during the rest of the week. How far dramatic performances and other very attractive forms of public amus.e.m.e.nt should be permitted to take place on Sunday is a question which ought to be settled by munic.i.p.al authorities, with due reference to each special case. The people whose feelings ought to be considered are not those who wish to stay away from such places. They can easily do that without help from the police. The people who ought to be heard, first and last, are those who wish to get innocent amus.e.m.e.nt on their one day of leisure; and the only thing which the police need do is to see that they do get it without being defrauded or tempted into vice. Only the actual existence of such temptation can justify interference with dancing or card-playing in a private house.
The Sunday reforms most needed, however, are those which will promote out-door exercise and mental culture.
LIST OF DATES
1776. Declaration of American independence, July 4th.