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Individual Rights

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Sep 11, 1889

FromThe American Sentinel, Vol. 4, No. 33.

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Individual Rights.

By Editor

THE Sunday-law folks try to make considerable capital out of the plea of personal liberty. We do not deny that the phrase, “personal liberty” has been abused, but the abuse of that or any other term cannot be made an excuse for making either the name or the thing a term of reproach nor a symbol for all that is bad. There is such a thing as personal liberty, and it is right that it should be respected. Article I of Section I of the constitution of the new State of Washington justly declares that “governments are established to protect and maintain individual rights.” This is true, and we are happy to see it expressed in such a place. But “individual rights” is only another expression for “personal liberty.” A counterfeit, though diligently and abundantly circulated, should never be allowed to become an excuse for dropping or decrying the use of the genuine. It should only make honest people the more diligent in spreading abroad the knowledge and the use of the genuine.
It does not meet the opposition to Sunday laws to raise a cry against what the chiefest Sunday-law workers delight to call “the invading horde of unwashed foreigners,” who demand personal liberty. The opponents of Sunday laws are not all foreigners, nor are the people all criminals and anarchists who come from other countries to this. There are people who speak the name of Bismarck with a German accent who are respectable people, bona fide citizens of the United States, entitled to all the rights of citizens, and who, with others, have just as much right to enjoy their individual rights as the Sunday-law workers have to all rights individual and collective; and who have just as much right to oppose Sunday laws as anybody has to advocate them. And they have a right to all these things without being subjected to the sneers, the stale witticisms, and the reproachful epithets, of those who would establish a religious despotism in the name of “popular liberty.”