Speaker Cannon Defended

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · May 5, 1910

“Speaker Cannon Defended”

UNDER the above caption, the Washington Herald of April 25, published the following communication:—

“The preacher who tries to control politics is again in evidence. In an address delivered a week ago Sunday, in the Hamline Methodist Church, Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts accused the Speaker of the House of packing committees so that ‘no law for the protection of the sabbath or for the promotion of temperance has any chance to pass the House.’

“So far as Sunday legislation is concerned, this is certainly not true, for twice since Mr. Cannon has been Speaker, the House has passed Sunday bills, once on April 6, 1904, and again on June 11, 1906, and this in addition to the ‘Sunday-closing provisions’ which Mr. Crafts and a few others got tacked onto the government appropriations to the St. Louis and Jamestown expositions, of 1905 and 1907. This part of the charge, therefore, at least, can not be sustained. Mr. Cannon has not been as successful in holding this kind of legislation in check as is alleged.

“But even though Mr. Cannon had been instrumental in holding up Sunday legislation in Congress, as Col. Richard M. Johnson did in 1829 and 1830, it would be nothing to his discredit, for, as stated in those famous ‘Sunday Mail Reports,’ prepared by Mr. Johnson, and as every preacher even ought to know who has ever read the Constitution of the United States, Sunday legislation, being religious legislation, is unconstitutional. In such case of him it might be said, as the biographer said of Mr. Johnson for his bold, courageous, and patriotic stand against national Sunday legislation: ‘Charge him not with hostility to the principles of religion because he opposed the wishes and thwarted the designs of the clergy, rather say that he proved himself the friend of pure religion, by guarding it against a contaminating alliance with politics.’

“It was not through hostility or even indifference to religion that the founders of the national government interdicted Congress from passing religious laws, but, as stated by Bancroft, ‘that the infinite Spirit of eternal truth might move in its freedom and purity and power.’

“Before these men who are calling so insistently upon Congress to pass a Sunday law urge such legislation further, they ought to alter the principles upon which the national government was founded, and change the Constitution. That the real object behind the demand for this legislation is altogether at variance with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution is evident from such expressions as the following from an editorial in the April number of the Christian Statesman, the official organ of the National Reform Association:—

“‘Washington and the District of Columbia have no sabbath law. . . . The value of such a law would lie not only in the relief which it would bring to many who are now deprived of their weekly rest, but in the support which it would lend to the cause of our national Christianity.’

“This reveals the secret of this whole Sunday law movement — a desire to enforce a religious institution by law and thus gain ‘support’ from the government by law to a ‘national’ religion. In other words, if they have their way, the passage of such a law will be but the beginning of a national religious establishment, just as the Sunday law of Constantine in 321 was the beginning of the ‘support’ which the bishops of his time gained for their ‘national Christianity’ then, and of the wicked and oppressive religious establishment which followed. All honor to Speaker Cannon or to any other man in or out of Congress who sees the evil in such a movement and has the courage to battle against it.

“The great danger, as I have pointed out in the public prints of Washington before, is that Congress, through outside ecclesiastical pressure, will pass the unchristian, un-American, and unconstitutional Sunday law which it ought not to pass, and, through other untoward influences, fail to pass the grand, humane, constitutional, and much-needed law against the terrible liquor traffic which it ought to pass. Honest labor and innocent recreation and amusement on any day, though not consistent with proper Sabbath-keeping, is not a crime; but the doling out of that stuff which makes men murderously mad and criminals is a crime, and should be treated as such. The licensing of the traffic is nothing less than the licensing of crime. But the spirit in ‘spirits’ is not more wicked, nor, in the end, more degrading and ruinous in its effects than the spirit actuating and controlling an ecclesiastical tyranny. One would think that the world had seen enough of the evil results of both to let both forever alone.

“W. A. COLCORD.”