The Signs of the Times.
By Editor
OAKLAND, CAL., SECOND-DAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1889. We send no papers from this office without pay in advance unless by special arrangement. When persons receive copies without ordering them, they are sent by other parties, and we can give no information in regard to them. Persons thus receiving copies of the SIGNS are not indebted to the office, and will not be called upon for pay. Please read the papers and hand them to your friends to read. IN pursuance of our usual custom we will omit one issue of the SIGNS OF THE TIMES during our general camp-meeting. But as the volume consists of fifty numbers our subscribers will lose nothing by this omission while it will afford printers and editors an opportunity to attend this important meeting. Number 39 will bear date of October 14. A JAPANESE commissioner who was sent to England to report upon the influence of the Christian religion on those islands, recently returned to his home with the recommendation that the Japanese do not adopt the religion of Great Britain, as the prevalence of drunkenness is so common in that country. "Doubtless," says the Union Signal, "his decision would have been in no way reversed if his feet had trodden upon American rather than British soil, for the iniquitous traffic flaunts its hideous colors over the Stars and Stripes even more defiantly than it does over the Union Jack." It is stated that in Servia a law has been passed requiring all shops and places of business to be closed not only on Sunday, but on all the holy days of the church as well. All told, the number is 180. The law is rigidly enforced. A shop-keeper who supplied a customer with a little rice on one of the interdicted days, was recently fined 100 francs for his crime. But this is only Sunday legislation carried to its legitimate conclusion. If the State has a right to say that business shall be suspended on Sunday, it has the same right to say that it shall be suspended on other so-called holy days.