If a California Legislature should pass a Sunday law, what would be its fate? The Oakland "Enquirer" of Dec. 8, 1910, gives us this bit of news:
At the last meeting of the city council that body adopted an ordinance making it illegal — so far as it lay within the power of that body to do so — for barber shops to remain open on Sunday.
The "Enquirer" thinks it illegal, and gives its reasons therefor as follows:
It is the opinion of attorneys, generally, that this measure is unconstitutional, and this view is borne out by a decision of the State Supreme Court, rendered in 1896.
This decision was rendered in the case of Leo Jentzsch of San Francisco, a barber, who was arrested for working on Sunday. Jentzsch was convinced in the police court under section 310½ of the penal code of California, but was released by the Supreme Court on a writ of habeas corpus proceedings, the court declaring that the law is not only special, unjust, and unreasonable in its operation, but works an invasion upon personal liberty, the liberty of free labor.
Here Is the Section
The section of the code under which the defendant was convicted, reads as follows:
Every person who as proprietor, manager, lessee, employee, or agent, keeps open or conducts or causes to be kept open or conducted, any barber shop, bath-house and barber shop, barber shop of a bathing establishment, or hair-dressing establishment, or any place for shaving or hair-dressing, used or conducted in connection with any other place of business or resort, or who engages at work or labor as a barber in any shop or establishment on Sunday, or on a legal holiday, after the hour of twelve o'clock M. of said day, is guilty of a misdemeanor.
The Supreme Court decision was handed down by Justice Henshaw, who said:
It is not easy to see where or how this law protects labor from the unjust exactions of capital. A man's constitutional liberty means more than his personal freedom. It means with many other11rights, his right freely to labor, and to own the fruits of his toil. It is a curious law for the protection of labor which punishes the laborer for working. Yet that is precisely what this law does. This laboring barber, engaged in a most respectable, useful, and cleanly pursuit, is singled out from the thousands of his fellows, in other employments, and told that, willy nilly, he shall not work upon holidays and Sundays after twelve o'clock noon. His wishes, tastes, or necessities, are not consulted. If he labors, he is a criminal. Such protection to labor carried a little further would send him from the jail to the poorhouse.
Bacteria found on the 1-200,000th part of the bottom of a school drinking-cup
How comes it that the legislative eye was so keen to discern the needs of the oppressed barber, and yet was blind to his toiling brethren in other vocations? Steam-car and street-car operatives labor through long and weary Sunday hours, so do mill and factory hands. There is no Sunday period of rest, and no protection for the overworked employees of our daily papers. Do these not need rest and protection? The bare suggestion of these considerations shows the injustice and inequality of this law.
But in a law such as this, no reason has or can be shown why the followers of one useful and unobjectionable employment should be debarred from the right to employ labor upon certain days, and others in like classes of employment be not so debarred. If it be constitutional to single out one such class and deny its members the right to labor on one day in the week, it would be constitutional to prohibit them from following their vocation upon six days of the week. When any one class is singled out and put under the criminal ban of a law such as this, the law not only is special, unjust, and unreasonable in its operations, but it works an invasion on individual liberty, the liberty of free labor which it pretends to protect.
The Prisoner Is Discharged
Justice Henshaw's interpretation of the law was concurred in by Temple, J., McFarland, J., Garoutte, J., Harrison, J., Beatty, C. J. Justice Van Fleet concurred in the judgment.
It would seem, therefore, that any convictions made under the ordinance passed by the city council would be set aside in the same way, did any one care to carry the issue further.
Judge Henshaw truly says that "it is a curious law for the protection of labor which punishes the laborer for working. Yet that is precisely what this law does." And this is the logic of every Sunday law. The law is condemned too because it is class legislation; but that is also true of all Sunday legislation. It is demanded ever, for the opinions of a class, and against another class who prefer to observe Sunday in some other way.
Sunday laws of any sort are opening wedges to more vicious legislation. If a man can be prohibited by civil law from laboring one day in the week, he can be prohibited from working three days or seven days. If the law can rightly enforce idleness one day in the week, it can seven days. However honest, sincere, devoted, intelligent Sunday law advocates are (and there are many such), it does not affect the vicious, wicked principle embodied in the legislation, in all religious and class legislation.
