First Principles of Freedom.
[The following editorial from the Moscow (Idaho) Star-Mirror, a one-time strong Sunday advocate a correspondent writes us, is worthy of reproduction.] THE revival of Sunday laws in various cities is distinctly a religious movement. The laws in the first place reflected the religious creeds and predilections of their authors. In taking notice of the flaming zeal which everywhere accompanies Sunday-law enforcement, it should be remembered that, notwithstanding the pious inspiration of Sabbatarianism, the courts have held almost without exception that legislation of this kind can be sustained only on secular grounds. To advance religious belief as a reason for Sunday blue-laws would be to nullify them. We have the strange spectacle, therefore, of religious laws enacted and enforced at the demands of religionists, and upheld by the courts which deny that they are religious laws and assert that they are nothing more than police and health measures. This is a situation calling for a little common honesty and for some genuine American backbone. If the laws are to be enforced in obedience to a religious demand and for religious purposes, they should be carefully revised by the law-making powers, for it is probable that the best religious sentiment to-day is not reflected in these fantastic enactments. It may be doubted if a convention of any church would reenact the old Sunday code in its entirety. When we consider that most people are attached to no church and that many churches are liberal in the matter of Sunday diversions, it will be seen that any revision of these laws would probably result in expunging nine-tenths of them from the statute-books. Religious laws having no standing in court except on false pretense that they are secular in purpose ought to be easily repealed. When they were first enacted in this country they had the weight of the church, of wealth, of nine-tenths of the population and practically all respectability behind them. It is not so now. Compelling their rigid execution at this time, a few zealots are simply invoking the authority of sanctimonious lawgivers dead and gone for the regulation of people of different beliefs, different tastes, and different necessities. We are to remember also that true American liberty had some of its most important beginnings in successful assaults upon these very laws. It was not until the people had learned to question the despotic power of the New England theocracy and the state church of Virginia that they ventured to assail the awful pretensions of George III, who ruled by divine right. Sam Adams in Massachusetts and Thomas Jefferson in Virginia were hounded to their graves by the element which supported the blue-laws. These men and others almost as celebrated held that emancipation from ecclesiastical authority was essential to liberty. What would they have thought of 80,000,000 people subjected to religious laws which gained their force by judicial denials of the self-evident fact that they are religious laws? It is maintained in some quarters, and with reason, that repeated invasions of popular rights during the last thirty or forty years have resulted in a serious curtailment of liberty. If reasonable and harmless diversions on Sunday may now be prohibited by a small religious element, backed by a notorious false pretense in the courts, it must be that there has also been a most emphatic loss of independence on the part of the people. The worst of all slaves are those who willingly bend to the yoke. Many important questions are pressing for settlement, but they all shrink into insignificance in comparison with this one, involving as it does the personal liberty of millions. Tariffs, trusts, currency, rebates, and all such problems will hardly be dealt with wisely by men who are not free or by courts which are terrorized or insincere.