Sunday Laws and the Aristocracy.
By S.
The following from the Haverhill (Mass.) Gazette illustrates how Sunday laws, as enforced in most places, discriminate between the rich people and those upon whom fortune has not conferred the privileges of the aristocracy. A reader of the Gazette sends to it this communication touching Sunday law enforcement in the neighboring town of Riverside: “I noticed in your issue of Tuesday evening that the city marshal, accompanied by one of our aldermen, went on the warpath last Sunday and almost scared the life out of a crowd of boys who were playing ball in the pasture over on Silver hill. “Of course these ungodly boys ought by rights to go to church or Sunday school Sundays, but if they won’t do that and must have some amusement Sundays, they might come down here to Riverside and enjoy with us the play of our local golf club. I say ‘our club,’ but, bless you, we don’t any of us belong to it. We could not get in. It is made up of the real ‘toney,’ blue stocking, highest ‘sassiety’ of the town. About every fair Sunday for the past two years they have favored us with exhibitions of their skill as players, their good clothes and their fine turnouts, and I tell you we appreciate it highly. “Regard for the Sabbath law, did I hear you say? Perish the thought! Such things are all right for wicked, ungodly boys, playing common base ball, but our golf club, selected from Haverhill’s 400! The idea! Let the city fathers build some seats along the banks of the river where they can see the game, and send the boys down and let Marshal McLaughlin and Officer Bullock come with them. The club won’t object to their looking on if they don’t come too near.” Christianity makes no discrimination between rich and poor, but respects every right of the poor man equally with that of his wealthy neighbor. The “four hundred” have a right to play golf on Sunday or any day of the week, and the lovers of baseball have an equal right to indulge in that diversion, limited therein only by the obligations which lawfully restrict conduct on any day of the week. Sunday observing people have a right to their religious opinions, and should be respected in their practice of the same; but opinions do not outweigh rights. Labor or recreation is a right381on any day of the week, and any person’s opinion or the opinion of any number of persons, that Sunday labor or recreation ought not to be, counts for nothing in the scale of justice. No person has a right to have his opinion of right made a compulsory regulator of other people’s conduct.