Sunday Laws and the Workingman's Rest.
A great effort is being made by the advocates of Sunday laws to justify such legislation on the ground that the workingman must have one day of the week for rest, and cannot have this needed rest unless the Sunday laws secure it for him. How then do the Sunday laws secure this rest for the laboring man, weary and worn from the effects of six days’ toil? They compel the shutting down of factories and shops one day in each week, thus providing a day of rest for all who care to avail themselves of it. So far so good. But the Sunday laws do not stop here. They do not merely provide the opportunity for rest; they compel every person—employer and employe alike—to rest, to cease from all secular labor. They go beyond providing the privilege of rest, and compel cessation from work; and in making rest compulsory, and not a matter of free will, they provide no privilege at all, for compulsion is certainly not to be viewed in the light of a privilege.2 It might often be a privilege to an individual, during his day of rest, to improve the opportunity to perform some secular labor about his home and premises, proper attention to which demands a considerable amount of manual labor, which the average workingman cannot well do before or after working hours, or afford to hire done by others. But the Sunday law frowns upon this as it does upon the running of a factory by a “soulless corporation.” Work by the individual done for himself and by his own wish, is a desecration of Sunday, and must be stopped, the same as the running of shop or factory. Even though an individual does no work for a “soulless corporation,” but is his own employer, and considers it necessary oftentimes to work Sunday for the support of his family, the Sunday law nevertheless prohibits it, that he may be secured a day of rest! How restful, indeed, an individual must be under such circumstances. But the Sunday laws go still further; they go beyond rest altogether, and provide something entirely different. For not only do they decree that an individual shall not work on Sunday, but they forbid him every form of recreation. He must not play any games, must not hunt or fish, he must not go to any pleasure resort (these are all closed by the law), he cannot get out of the city, for all the street cars and trains have stopped running; he must sit down at home and do nothing and endeavor to find some rest in compulsory idleness—a vain quest. One thing he can do—go to church; where the average workingman does not care to go on Sunday, as an analysis of the Sunday congregations plainly shows. And this is his rest,—this is how the Sunday law provides for his recuperation from the week of toil—compelling him to do what he does not want to do, or to sit down and do nothing, when every faculty of mind and body is calling for some employment, as is always the case with a healthy individual when he is not asleep! What can be more tiresome—what more wearing upon the nerves and the whole system—than this compulsory loafing, this strain of keeping idle faculties that continually clamor for some form of occupation? Yawning with weariness and ennui, looking out upon the world as from the grated window of a prison and counting the hours as they drag slowly by, employing the while various devices to “kill time,” the “emancipated” workingman worries along through his day of “rest” and awakens Monday morning with a feeling of relief that he is again at liberty to give vent to the natural activity of body and brain, to go out and mingle with his fellow-beings without any feeling of restraint upon his actions save that to which he has been accustomed as a lawabiding member of society. Of course, the individual who has a religious regard for the Sabbath day and enjoys communion with the Creator, will find in the Sabbath a peculiar and exalted pleasure, and will experience no weariness from want of occupation, because both body and mind are fully occupied in the devotional exercises of the day. But this is true only of those who love the Sabbath, and the law cannot put into any heart a single emotion of love. It may make the day more odious to some by joining with it exactions contrary to one’s sense of liberty and natural rights; it cannot make it more attractive to any. And as we have mentioned, the great majority of the workingmen for whose good Sunday laws are alleged to be necessary, have no love for the day, other than as a day of amusement and recreation. Is this picture overdrawn? If it is, it is because the present Sunday laws are not such as the advocates of Sunday observance want, and are not enforced as this class desire and mean that they shall be. When such laws as they want are enacted and enforced, there will be an end both to secular work and worldly pleasure on the day they call the “Christian Sabbath,” and the workingman will enjoy (?) precisely such “rest” and experience precisely such recuperation from his week of toil as we have described. In the light of such facts, which nobody can candidly deny, the alleged benefit of the Sunday laws to the laboringman dwindles to the vanishing point, and the argument based on such grounds is seen to be but a disguised plea for the exaltation of a religious institution, by a means contrary to Christianity and to just principles of government. Let the workingmen have liberty—the liberty to which all men are entitled every day in the week, and let the Sabbath rest upon the foundation of conscience and the love of God, where the Creator himself has placed it.