ANY PRETEXT FOR SUNDAY LEGISLATION.
By W. N. G.
HAVING seen the futility of endeavoring to secure the enactment of the original drastic Sunday Bill by the California Legislature, and having failed to secure even a favorable report of the modified bill, the devotees of religious legislation feel that it would be too much of a damper on their political influence not to get some recognition of their labors for Sunday elevation. So they have prevailed upon Senator Simpson to introduce another bill, which he is careful to add is "by request," as was the former one. Here it is:— TO PREVENT THE SALE OF INTOXICATING LIQUORS ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE WEEK, COMMONLY CALLED SUNDAY. The people of the State of California, represented in Senate and Assembly, do enact as follows:— SECTION 1. Any person who, on the Christian sabbath, commonly called Sunday, or between the hour of twelve o'clock Saturday night and twelve o'clock sabbath night, will keep open any saloon or any other place where any kind of intoxicating liquor is sold or given away, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction shall be punished by a fine of not less than fifty dollars, nor more than two hundred, or by imprisonment not less than one month, nor more than four. SEC. 2. Prosecution for violations of this act may be by complaint to a magistrate, or justice of the peace, or by indictment by a grand jury, or by a police officer in an incorporate town or city; and all fines collected upon convictions under this act shall be paid into the common-school fund of the county. SEC. 3. This act shall take effect and be in force on and after the eleventh day of March, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine. The first point in the bill is a State declaration that Sunday, the first day of the week, is the Christian sabbath. Evidently this is the principal object of the bill, as it carefully defines the hours. The former Sunday Bill contained similar expressions, but its friends saw that it could not go through bearing such a load, so its champions had it amended so as to eliminate such expressions, and thus, if possible, whitewash over the religious intent. But that attempt having failed, they have taken another tack. This time it is under the guise of temperance legislation, but the real design crops out in bold relief,—it is Sunday legislation pure and simple. Somehow these Church-and-State advocates can not hide their colors, do what they will. They weep over the oppressions of the laboring man, but their suggestions for relief culminate in a Sunday law, and that, too, while admitting that the wealthy corporations which cause most of the oppression must be overlooked in its operation. Then they come with a pretense of a temperance measure, and that also stops with a Sunday law. Somehow their ideas of reform, of whatever character, begin and end with proposed compulsory Sunday observance. The peculiarity of this Sunday-closing temperance effort bears with it the tacit admission that the saloon, altho very bad on Sunday, is legitimate on every other day. In fact, such a law emphatically says so. How can ministers of the Gospel consistently warn their flocks or the public against the baneful influences of the saloon, after giving their sanction to a State law that recognizes the propriety of such institutions six days in the week? They simply shut themselves up to preaching a temperance gospel for Sunday only, and even that is made unnecessary by legal prohibition on that day. All this inconsistency and much more is boldly upheld that a certain class of religious people may secure a law of the State by which they can dominate the actions of other people. And the worst of it all is, it is done in the name of Christianity, whose basic principle is, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."