Our Liberty Series by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · May 7, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 19.

Our Liberty Series

By Editor

It is good advice which the editor of a Catholic paper, the Western Watchman, gives its people, in its issue of April 11, 1912: "They have elected a priest mayor up in Michigan. The office of a priest is divine, and consists of prayers, not politics; sermons, not stump speeches; confessions, not caucuses. There ought to be enough good Catholics up in Lapeer to keep a priest out of the mayoralty." But he was probably in politics before he was made mayor.

Our Liberty Series

We are stating the matter mildly when we say that our next six weeks' issues are of vital importance. There is no greater boon that earth can give than Liberty, Civil Liberty; the Liberty that our Revolutionary fathers fought and bled and died to secure and establish. And this Civil Liberty includes Religious Liberty — Liberty to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and creed, provided we do not infringe the equal rights of our fellows.

How few know what Liberty is, what its boundary lines are between license on the one side and tolerance on the other! How few know the limit where there can be no compromise if Liberty is to be preserved!

Those who intelligently read our next series will know the meaning of Liberty from the view-point of the statesman, the Christian, the citizen.

They will learn of Liberty's source.

They will learn much of its history.

They will learn of its blessings. They will learn that Liberty in this land is in danger; that the sappers and miners are at work; that good men, deceived by unholy sophistry, are battling on the wrong side of the question.

It is time to give the warning, and this journal is attempting to do it simply, clearly, strongly, truthfully.

Our advocacy is for principles of eternal truth; our warfare is against the perversion of those principles.

We plead with our subscribers to read and study the series, and arouse the interest of friend, and neighbor, and fellow citizen, male and female.

One hundred and thirty-six years ago the great struggle for Liberty — civil and religious — centered on a narrow strip of country in the East; to-day the mightiest battles are to be fought in the coast section of the great Golden West.

Would you know how men are seeking to subvert Liberty and enslave conscience? Then read our next six weeks' series.

Price for the six numbers, sent to any address, 25 cents. See on page 14.

Now is the time to work. To-morrow may be too late.

Our correspondent, Mr. J. F. Blunt, secretary of the Religious Liberty Association of the coast, writes us from Arizona that the barbers' bill in the interest of Sunday closing, known as House Bill No. 33, was withdrawn. There were presented before the legislature resolutions adopted by a mass-meeting held at Phoenix, expressing the thought that man was created a free moral agent, not subject to the dictation of his fellow men in matters of conscience, reciting the sad history of the past where human rights had been trampled upon, and asking the State of Arizona to safeguard this freedom which had been vouchsafed to mankind. But an amended bill, or a new bill, has been presented, endeavoring to meet the defects of the former bill, and the fight is on at the present time over this, with a seeming disposition to set aside all class legislation, in which, of course, a barbers' Sunday bill would fall, and this not in antagonism to labor, but on the very merits of the question itself. It is reported that the women's suffrage measure has been killed in the senate, and both houses have voted down the union label measure. We hope that Arizona will put itself on record as a State in which the rights of men are guaranteed.

LATER: The above note was written for last issue but was omitted through oversight. Word received from Phoenix April 22 states that the barbers' Sunday bill was defeated in the house by a vote of 20 to 13.