STILL FOR PERSECUTION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Nov 1, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 44.

STILL FOR PERSECUTION.

THE organ of the National Reform Association still openly endorses persecution for people and states who do not believe in the association's idea of Sunday observance. It passes judgment upon the various states by means of a map, illustrating the character of their Sunday laws. It paints California, Idaho, and Arizona, as black as tar, because they have no general Sunday laws. Yet prominent ministers

from the East have spoken very favorably of the orderly manner in which the day is observed in California; and if the daily news is any criterion, the morals of the people of this state will compare favorably with those of the inhabitants of the state that has been the headquarters of the National Reform Association for forty years.

National Reform is especially a religious-political move, and with its strenuous home work for a period of forty years, backed by a Sunday law of a veritable Puritan character, its home state has a record for political darkness second to none in the Union. California never began to make such a record, much less to keep it up for years.

In the aforesaid map the states that have been foremost in persecuting people who quietly performed honest labor on Sunday, after religiously observing the Sabbath of the Lord the previous day, are marked as pure and white. All states having "strong" Sunday laws are marked white; while those whose Sunday laws "are weakened by numerous exceptions, or are inherently weak," are shaded. Two of the states that formerly did persecuting work, but for some reason relaxed their laws, are shaded.

These things go to prove that the association still maintains the theory that persecution for dissenters is legitimate reform; this, too, altho one of its foremost and most aggressive spirits, when hard pressed for a temporary retreat, admitted that the states which a few years ago had persecuted orderly citizens under the Sunday law, were "backward states."

Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that leading men in the National Reform movement have placed on record some very radical declarations of intention when the movement shall have succeeded in putting them and their class in control of the government. These declarations include, in emphasized language, disfranchisement, banishment, and even the death penalty, for dissenters from National Reform law. And these utterances were not merely the words of individuals, but of representative men, whose words have not been repudiated, in jot or tittle, by the association; while the men still hold exalted position in the movement, recognized as authoritative spokesmen.

Yes, be it known to all that the National Reform Association still stands for church-and-state union of the most radical form—and for relentless persecution of dissenters.