3570 — Sunday Laws and Prohibition
By Editor
Please give the reasons why a law prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicants is right, and one forbidding Sunday labor is wrong. Are not both class legislation? The design of the prohibition of the manufacture and sale of intoxicants has naught to do with class. It does not prevent any one from drinking, if he has liquor. It does prohibit the manufacture and sale for public purposes. One of the chief reasons for doing this, from a political standpoint, is the enormous drain that the liquor business is upon the community. If those who manufacture and sell liquor, met all the expense and tragedy of the liquor traffic, that would be one thing. But they do not. They impose upon the community a fearful burden, which the community itself must bear, in the drunkards and paupers they make, in the widows and orphans, or worse than widows and orphans, in the crime and corruption that is fostered, in a hundred different ways, breaking down all barriers of law, of society, and loading continually heavy burdens upon the community. The saloons make necessary the great number of police in our cities and towns; they furnish a great deal of the material for the courts. The mere suggestion of these will bring to the minds of our readers very much more than we have mentioned as the result of the liquor traffic. It has to do wholly and solely with the economic problem of our cities and towns. In a long series of years, a country could better afford to pay pension to the men engaged in the liquor traffic, until they died, than to allow the traffic to go on; and this from a purely economic standpoint. A Sunday law is altogether different. It is class legislation; it is more, it touches the rights of mankind. It touches the very highest class of those rights, the right to worship God according to the dictates of one's own conscience, and the right to earn a living for his family, working in what way and how long one will. It does not strike directly at evils, economic or otherwise. It certainly has been demonstrated that the Sunday is as well kept in communities where there is no Sunday law as in communities where there is one. Neighbors get along just as peacefully; there is just as much quiet; there is far more agreement, less trouble and prejudice in every way, than where Sunday laws exist. Their most serious effects fall, many times, upon those the most conscientious and faithful. In nearly all cases of prohibition of the liquor traffic, time is given for the saloon man to adjust his business. Adjusting his business, he has no trouble from the law. He could not say that conscientiously he must follow that business. No saloon-keeper in the world would ever make such a claim as that. Any other business equally profitable, or less, would be preferable; for few saloon-keepers would actually prefer a business like that, were they not trained to that one thing. But this is not the case at all with the Sunday law. It does have to do with conscience and one's relationship to his God.