Contest Over Sunday in Oregon
By Hampton W. Cottrell
Appeal Is Made to the Courts for Relief—More Rigorous Laws Sought by the Initiative—Earnest Campaign Against the Invasion of Civil and Religious Rights
IN the case of the grocer charged with violating the Sunday law, which case was recently appealed from a lower court to the circuit court, Judge Gantenbein ruled the Sunday law unconstitutional, and declared an injunction against its enforcement in Multnomah County. Another suit was brought before three United States district judges, one from each of the states of Oregon, Washington, and California, by a Portland corporation whose goods are sold throughout the state, asking for an injunction against Sunday closing in forty-seven counties of the state, on the ground of the unconstitutionality of the law. The hearing has been had. The injunction was not granted, and we await their decision relative to the constitutionality of the Oregon Sunday law. WOULD BE MORE STRINGENT ON SUNDAY
The Rev. G. L. Tufts, of Berkeley, California, superintendent of the Sunday Rest League, is lecturing in various churches throughout the state, in the interest of a still more stringent Sunday law for Oregon, to be initiated at the next general election. The North Pacific Religious Liberty Association, and also the similar organizations in Oregon and Washington, are awake to the situation, and are improving this opportunity to enlighten the people relative to the proposed further invasion of their civil and religious rights by the anticipated religio-civil initiative legislation. We are campaigning throughout the states of Oregon and Washington in the interest of the natural rights and liberties of all the people. Mass meetings have been held in three of the largest theaters in Portland, and in a theater or opera house in each of the following cities: Salem, Eugene, Hillsboro, and Forest Grove, in Oregon; and Tacoma and Seattle, Washington. CROWDED HOUSES HEAR THE DISCUSSION
We have had crowded houses except at Portland, at which place we were obliged to hold the meetings at the unfavorable hour of eleven o'clock on Sunday morning. However, there was an attendance of two thousand people, who gave marked attention to Prof. C. S. Longacre, of Washington, D. C.; W. M. Healey, of San Diego; and Luther Warren, of Los Angeles, California. Messrs. Longacre and Healey lectured also in Tacoma and Seattle. Mr. Healey is still campaigning with us, and arrangements are completed for lectures in four other theaters or opera houses in the near future. We plan on a continued campaign in the interest of the rights and liberties of every man, woman, and child. A RELIGIOUS MOTIVE AT THE BOTTOM
The contention of the "National Reformers" who are promoting Sunday legislation, is that it is not for religious purposes, but for civic rest only, on behalf of the workmen in mines, factories, and shops. They tell us that these people are deprived of their right to rest on Sunday and to go to church. However, such is not the case. Any one of them and every one of them could stop work once every week and rest on Sunday if he so willed. Their right to rest is not infringed, as matters now obtain; for they can rest or work, as they will to do, each for himself. In proof of this assertion, let us notice the body of seventh-day observers, a very conscientious people, taken from the factories, the mines, the shops, the banks, and the various other walks of life. They stop work every week when the seventh day arrives. They do not have to work on the day on which they desire to rest. Neither do they have to initiate a Saturday religio-civil law to compel themselves to rest on the day of their choice, or to compel people who rest on Sunday to rest on Saturday, or by civil enactment to force those who are not religious to act on Saturday as though they were religious. Of a truth, many of the wives and mothers of our land are the people whose strength is overtaxed. They work from early dawn to the late hours of the night, with scrub brush in hand, or over the washtub, or at other unending tasks, that the souls and bodies of the children may be kept together, and that the unemployed husbands and sons may have the necessary food and clothes. Will this proposed "one-day-of-rest-in-seven" (Sunday) law remedy this direful condition, brought about because so many men have but two or three days' work in a week, or — as in many thousands of cases — for many months at a time have rest every day? Such men need work, not rest. Speaking fairly and frankly, the men and women who are in bondage are not those who have regular employment in mines, factories, and banks, but those who have no employment. Then men should not legislate to bind people about with religio-civil laws, and thus wrench from free citizens one seventh of their time, which every man has a right to use as he may individually decide, in earning his living, or in seeking his own happiness or that of his family, or in religious worship, provided only that in either case he does not invade the equal right of any other person by so doing. DESIRE A STATE-ENFORCED RELIGION
It is not civic rest our National Reformers are seeking, in their endeavor to secure a more rigorous Sunday law, but the enforcement, by civil law, of a sectarian religious idea of Sunday sacredness. They are well aware that such an idea cannot be sustained by Biblical authority. Thus they are compelled either to yield that point in their creed, or to appeal to civil law to enforce it. Their civic rest plea is a mere subterfuge, and some of the people are fully aware of this fact; but all the people should be informed of it before the legislation proposed crashes upon them like a great avalanche. Every man and woman should arise in the might of right, and stand for the principle of natural liberty, resolute as an immovable rock, and calm as the North Star; for this is a God-given heritage.