The Real Opposition to Sunday Newspapers
The following from the Churchman is interesting as showing the real ground of opposition to Sunday newspapers; it is not the labor that is performed on Sunday, but it is because the Sunday paper is a too successful rival of the churches:— “The outcry in England against the appearance in London of a Sunday edition of the New York Herald appears to be a little paradoxical. Everyone knows that in the principal centers of population in England there always have been Sunday papers of more or less respectability. The Observer is really a high-class Sunday paper. The projectors of the Herald evidently consider both Paris and London as mere suburbs of New York, but the opposition to their Sunday edition suggests a question as to the violation of Sunday rest involved in the Monday edition of a paper. It is the Monday paper that requires editors, compositors, and printers to work on Sunday. Only the publishing and distribution of the Sunday paper demands Sunday labor. It seems a more rational demand that proprietors of newspapers do as Italian papers in this city do, i. e., omit a Monday edition, or else publish it only at noon or after noon. But of course we must not lose sight of what is, after all, the strongest argument against the Sunday paper, namely, that its piquant attractions, its utter worldliness and secularity, distract the minds of the people from the religious observance of the week’s one hallowed day.”