THAT DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA SUNDAY BILL.
By Editor
THREE WEEKS ago we published in full the proposed Sunday Enforcement Law for the District of Columbia, now before Congress. From a document sent out by the Religious Liberty Bureau, we take these significant comments: This bill is the same as the one (H. R. 4859) that died in the House, March 4, 1905, at the close of the Fifty-eighth Congress, with the exception that this one has a preamble,—a rather remarkable and unusual thing in ordinary legislation,—setting forth certain reasons why the proposed law should be enacted. As now prepared, it sounds more like some conference resolution or Sunday-school petition, than a bill to be enacted into law by Congress. The religious character of the bill is apparent. According to its title, its object is, "to protect the first day of the week as a day of rest," or sabbath. Sabbath means rest, or cessation from labor. Upon its own showing, the bill is designed to protect the day, not the people. It is the "peace and quiet of the day" with which it is concerned. Work which upon any other day would be considered perfectly proper, is by it declared to be a "great offense" to "Christian and humane citizens." Works of "charity or necessity" it graciously permits. But what are works of charity and necessity? Who is to decide? A Sunday excursion for the poor might, by some, be considered a charity; and harvesting to save crops, or labor to provide for a family, by others, a necessity. Twice, it says, the District commissioners have approved of the measure, and, in a very adroit manner, represents the President as favoring such legislation,—that he has "regretfully said" there was no law enabling him to suppress Sunday toil in the District. It makes honest labor and trade on Sunday a penal offense, but permits the sale of tobacco, cigars, and malt and spirituous liquors under limitations, on that day. A strange inconsistency! Such legislation has been urged as necessary because certain dealers are "compelled to keep open their places of business on Sunday to compete with those dealers who do not respect that holy day."—(Washington Evening Star, April 14, 1904.) This at once shows the character and object of the desired legislation. It is religious, and is designed to stop all Sunday competition by compelling non-Sunday-observing dealers to respect the "holy day." Must the right of men to choose their own religion and their own time to rest and labor be treated as a crime, in order that those who observe Sunday shall have no Sunday competition? It should never be forgotten that a religious monopoly is the most dangerous, the most unreasonable, and the most oppressive of all monopolies. No one in the District of Columbia is compelled now to labor or keep open any place of business on Sunday. All are free to rest and observe Sunday as a "holy day" if they desire to do so. But if this bill becomes a law, freedom is gone. Then all embraced in its provisions will be compelled to cease from business and trade on Sunday, and to observe the day, whether they desire to do so or not, or be subjected to heavy and repeated fines. If a man is religious from principle, he will do that which he believes to be right, even tho he loses financially by so doing. The religion which is a matter of so little conscience that it needs a governmental prop to support it, can not benefit its possessor, and would certainly be a dangerous thing to embody into civil law. Moreover, if those who observe Sunday need a law compelling others to observe the day, then, by parity of reasoning, those who observe any other day need a law requiring others to observe that day.7And the state can not grant such a law to one class and deny it to another, without enacting class legislation, taking sides in a religious controversy,—the question of which day is the Sabbath,—and making an unjust distinction between its citizens.