A NATIONAL QUESTION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Oct 3, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 39.

A NATIONAL QUESTION.

This is what the Sunday question has been for some time—since 1892, when Congress decided that Sunday was the Sabbath; but now it is recognized as such by prominent newspapers, especially since the agitation of the matter in New York City. Its last disguise in coming before the people is that of a temperance measure—the closing of saloons on that day. But the veneer is so thin that it is ofttimes worn through or rubbed off by the advocates of the measure themselves, and the true grain of the body timber is revealed as clear as noonday. The veneer is ostensibly a demand in the interests of temperance. The body of base timber which the veneer is thought to hide will be found to be a full-fledged Sunday law, with all the attendant evils of church and state. What is wanted is a law to exalt Sunday, to protect, to promote a religious institution.

The question is one that great political parties can no longer ignore. The great Republican party of New York state, which at the last election reversed the politics of the state, finds it necessary to its existence, as declared in its late convention, to indorse the Sunday law, not even leaving it to the principles of local option. The platform declares that the Sunday question will “measure the moral tone of the Empire State.” It adds:—

“We believe in the American Sunday, and that the traditions of the Republican party favor the preservation of all those conditions and principles calculated to bring peace, prosperity, and happiness to the masses of the people.”

The leading voice in this decision was that of Ex-Senator Warner Miller. The reason may be found in remarks of Chauncey M. Depew before the convention, which we clip from the (Cleveland, O.) Methodist Times of September 20:—

The theory of the Republican party should be clearly defined on this excise question. It should not hesitate or shrink. It should come out squarely one way or the other, either for enforcement or against. If against it you will get the German vote; if for it you will get the church and school vote; but if neither for nor against it, you will disgust the people, make them doubt your sincerity, and lose their entire vote.

It was fear of the religious boycott that brought the party to terms. We may well close this in the language of the United States Senate, in a report on the Sunday question, in 1829, the wisdom of which all will do well to ponder:—

Extensive religious combinations to effect a political object are always dangerous. . . . All religious despotism commences by combination and influence; and when that influence begins to operate upon the political institutions of the country, the civil power soon bends under it, and the catastrophe of other nations furnishes an awful warning of the consequence.