The Conservation of Inalienable Rights by S. B. H.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jan 25, 1912

The Conservation of Inalienable Rights

By S. B. H.

In the Outlook of Dec. 23, 1911, Colonel Roosevelt writes an article on “The Conservation of Womanhood and Childhood,” in which he discusses the great problem of labor, dealing especially with the relation that women and children sustain to the question of earning their daily bread.

Upon the question of seven-day work, Colonel Roosevelt says:—

“With respect to this necessarily continuous seven-day work, our old Sunday laws, dating back to an earlier generation, have broken down. Relief to the workers can be afforded only by increasing the labor force one seventh, if necessary, to let part of the force off each day in the week; and in that way give every man one day of rest in the seven. Legislation is needed to bring this about in this country, just as it has been brought about in France. And such legislation would be sustained by the courts unless they scuttled the logic on which the Sunday laws now on the statute-books have been sustained; that is, as an exercise of the police power in protecting men from continuous toil. The supreme courts of practically every State in the Union have gone on record as upholding Sunday laws, and in 1884 the United States Supreme Court expressed its approval of them, ‘not from any right of the government to legislate for the promotion of religious observances, but from its right to protect all persons from the physical and moral debasement which comes from uninterrupted labor.’ The priests and ministers and physicians of every mill town in America where the seven-day week governs can testify how it undermines the comfort of their people, their happiness, and their health. At the present time the progressive men in one big industry where it has been at its worst—steel—are tackling this seven-day schedule, and it looks as if they were going to be able to down it. The American Iron and Steel Institute has passed resolutions to that effect. So has the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, representing churches with a membership of thirty millions. It is high time we had six-day statutes and that they were enforced.”

While on its face the article bespeaks an interest in the toilers’ welfare, and notwithstanding that from the colonel’s view-point Sunday laws “have been decided to be in accordance with police regulation, and not necessarily religious in effect,” still we believe that a law demanding that all people shall rest on Sunday has been shown ever since the first Sunday law of 321 A. D., to be in the interests of religion; and at the present time, when so much agitation and determined effort have been made by the clergy before Congress to get that body committed to Sunday legislation, there can be no doubt that the cause of religion is expected to be subserved in Sunday legislation.

Is it not time that the American people should think seriously about the “conservation” of their inalienable rights, while their minds are being directed to the conservation of the forests, the coal-fields, the waterways, and the toilers’ interests? There is no greater slavery than that which takes away from man the inalienable rights guaranteed in our national Constitution. We believe that these inalienable rights are menaced by Sunday legislation. S. B. H.