NOT PRECEDENT, BUT JUSTICE.
In a communication in the Minneapolis Journal of February 25, Mr. Joseph E. Pierce, of Neenah, Wis., discusses the subject, "Wherein the Sunday Law Is Not Right." After making reference to the Minnesota Sunday law, the writer continues: In "Elements of Right and the Law" (section 520), Mr. Smith says: "It is a well-established principle of the American law that an act of Congress in excess of the constitutional powers of the federal government is absolutely void; and so far as the direct infringement of private rights is concerned, this principle is in fact enforced by the courts; but in questions merely political there is in general no practical means of restraining the execution of the law. Nevertheless, such a law is void, and not only affords no legal justification to any one seeking to enforce it, but every subordinate officer, and indeed every private individual, has the right to disobey it, and will be vindicated in so doing by the courts." Under the Constitution of the United States, the individual retains his natural rights, and government is limited accordingly. And as every individual equally has the natural right to worship whom he pleases and on what day he pleases (as long as he interferes not with this same liberty in others), or to refrain from worshiping altogether, any human law interfering with this right is, under our constitutions, void; it matters not whether it be a Sunday law, a law to compel him to attend church, or a law requiring any other religious observance, if it interferes with the right of a single individual, it is unconstitutional and absolutely void. It is true that our judiciary have not always had a clear conception of this principle, and numerous decisions are flatly contradictory. But this is because in some cases precedents have been followed, not principle. Law, by some, has been regarded as a bundle of previous decisions, rather than as science founded, like other sciences, on the immutable law of nature. The erroneousness of such a view must be obvious to all who have given it any reflection. "The law of England," Lord Mansfield observed, "would be an absurd science were it founded on precedent only," and Lord Coke repeatedly declared that the law "is the perfection of reason." "Reason," said he, "is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason." And should our judges and legislators incline more to justice and reason and less to the precedents dictated by bigotry, our government will become more liberal, and that relic of the Dark Ages, the Sunday law, will go the way that similar laws have gone before it. In order to fulfil the objects of government, every man must be insured "the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the exercise of like liberty by every other man." This is the principle asserted in the Declaration of Independence when it says, "All men are created equal," and the repeated departures from it in our religious laws which discriminate against the Sabbatarian and the Jew are a standing reproach to our government and a constant travesty on justice.