SUNDAY ENFORCEMENT NOTES AND COMMENT.
By Editor
UNDER the caption, "Weekly Rest-day in Italy," the Review of Reviews presents the following: "Some months ago the Italian Parliament voted down a bill providing for a weekly day of rest for employees supported by several associations and leagues of several years' standing. In the Riforma Sociale Turin-Rome, E. Loli-Piccolomini discusses the reasons for this defeat, the general principles of a rest day, and the practical conditions necessary for probability of success for future legislation. The defeat of the bill offered by Deputies Cabrini, Nofri, and Chiesa he ascribes to its too wholesale and arbitrary character, overloaded, as it became, with impractical amendments. In principle it was almost universally approved. The writer insists that individual liberty to work or not must be respected. Tho for various practicable reasons Sunday rest is preferable to the fixing of any other one day, or of leaving the choice of day optional, the state should be entirely lay, and should take no account of the dogma of any religion, because all should be free to exercise their own moral action. The chief difficulty lies in application to the various conditions of industries, the railroads and newspapers being most complex in their problems, into which the writer goes extensively." It is evident from this that there is to be a continuation of the movement for a weekly rest-day law in Italy. And the important and significant fact is also evident from this that the basis of such legislation is altogether different on the part of the working class and the Socialists (who are the force behind this movement in Italy), from that of the religious element. STRICT enforcement of the Sunday ordinance with regard to Sunday selling and opening of business places has been inaugurated by the city authorities of McPherson, Kan. On July 25 the city marshal served notice on merchants who were found selling goods on the preceding Sunday that Sunday sales must cease, and that if their stores were found open for business on the following Sunday arrests would be made. He stated that he had been instructed to put a stop to all illegal selling on Sunday, and would carry his order out to the letter. The city officials are determined to put a stop to all Sunday selling of goods as restricted by the city ordinance. A local newspaper says other towns in the state, and especially large towns, observe the Sunday-selling laws very closely, and the day is soon coming when they will be enforced in every town in the state, and McPherson should not be backward in following the good example of her sister cities. IN response to complaints by grocers that the meat markets are disregarding the law by keeping their places open a part of each Sunday, the chief of police of Wichita, Kan., has announced that every place of business found open on Sunday in the future, contrary to law, will be closed and the proprietors arrested. The Lawrence Journal observes that while the violation of law on one day by the butcher shops is not to be tolerated in Wichita, nothing is said about the every-day violation of the prohibitory law. But the Journal should remember that it is not the every-day violation of law, but the violation of Sunday law, that is the terrible thing in these days of uncompromising "law enforcement." AT Geneva, N. Y., on July 14, the jury in the case of certain baseball players charged with a violation of law regarding Sunday ball, returned a verdict of acquittal after being out six minutes. The next day it was announced that mass-meetings to protest against the continuance of Sunday baseball would be held immediately in the leading Methodist and Baptist churches of the place.