Sunday Closing in Missouri

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Nov 7, 1907

Sunday Closing in Missouri

OUR readers will remember that in our last issues, the Sunday-closing crusade in Kansas City, Mo., has been referred to, and that in spite of the efforts made by the friends of religious liberty, the instructions of Judge Wallace of the criminal court were enforced on Sunday, October 20. We learn by a letter from Brother James Cochran to Elder K. C. Russell that the following Sunday “everything was practically wide open. The theater men applied to the federal court for an injunction to bar Judge Wallace, the grand jury, the prosecuting attorney, and the police commissioners from making arrests. The injunction was granted, and with it came a tremendous scoring of Judge Wallace by the federal judge.”

The following are the words of Federal Judge Pollock uttered at the time of issuing the injunction:—

This is a very remarkable case. It is charged that a judge of one of your courts has not conducted himself in a fair, just, and impartial manner. He has impaneled his own jury, and has done so with the intention that they carry out his own personal ideas. He has entered the grand-jury room while the jury was deliberating, thus violating deliberately the precedent that such deliberations should be secret and sacred.

I can not understand how a judge of a court could consider for a moment a persecution such as has been threatened in this case. It is just as much the duty of a court of law to see that the innocent do not suffer as it is to prosecute those who offend against the laws. The bill before me alleges that the grand jury, under instructions from Judge Wallace, has threatened these prosecutions against the actors merely as a part of a scheme to “bluff” them out, and that there is no real intention to arrest these persons. I personally do not go to the theater on Sunday, but I do not think that any judge should set up his own convictions in the matter as to the law, or to dictate to any man how he shall spend the sabbath, as long as he conducts himself in a law-abiding manner.

There are many evidences that the literature circulated by our people during the campaign, and the articles published by them in the daily papers, have had an enlightening influence upon the public. Some of the arguments used by our speakers and writers are being reiterated now in the public press. Our people sought to make it clear that while deeply conscious of the value of religion in the life, and strongly opposed to the liquor traffic and the theater in general, they could not look with approval upon compulsion in religious matters, and that efforts to stop these evils on Sunday were merely the exaltation of a day and the establishment of religion by law.