You, my Lord, would not like to be robbed of the comforts of home on a Sabbath; to have your health broken up by incessant labour; and, if a Christian, nothing would be more painful to you than to be deprived of the rest and spiritual enjoyments of the Lord’s-day: then how can you wish stokers, porters, clerks, and waiters to be thus injured? You must, my Lord, you must “love your neighbour as yourself,” or you cannot be a Christian; and therefore you cannot be a Christian if you encourage Sabbath labour. And the railway speculators who wanted you by royal charter to sacrifice the liberties, comforts, health, and lives of your fellow citizens, at once deprived themselves of all claim to Christian, humane, or equitable principle. To enrich themselves, they were willing to barter away all the dearest rights of their brethren and sisters by robbing them of the rest of the Sabbath; and what is worse still, they tried to cover over all this wickedness with the pretence of having a regard to the happiness of the working classes. Judas of old professed to have very great sympathy for the poor; but we are told that his seemingly pious considerations arose rather from avarice than benevolence. “This he said, not that he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.” If the Sydenham philanthropists feel so much for the comforts of the poor, let them become clerks, drivers, and waiters themselves, and carry the people for nothing: or let them devote a week-day to the gratuitous conveyance of the masses to the Crystal Palace, and not a voice, even in obedience to the sophistry of pseudo philanthropists, will be raised to have the building open on the Sabbath.
Sabbath labour, then, my Lord, is a gross violation of the law, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”; and I am persuaded that even the misled Spitalfields weavers, and others, when they understand the bearing of the whole subject, have too much humanity and justice about them to wish that workmen employed on the railway should be enslaved on the Sabbath to minister to their pleasure. The operatives of our country generally demand, “Justice for all, and favour to none,” and therefore will hardly desire that one portion of their brethren should be deprived of the rest and comforts of home on the Sunday to enable another portion to indulge in various amusements. This would be to imitate the slave owners, oppressors, and tyrants whom they so loudly denounce, and would prove that, were they in power, they would wield the iron rod of the despot as cruelly as any Pharaoh, Nero, or Russian Czar. The stoker, the clerk, and the porter have bodies and souls. Six days’ toil on a railway, over the same ground and subject to the same monotony of duties, is as fatiguing to them as driving the shuttle or superintending the spindle. There is generally no very great variety of scenery for the clerk who gives out the tickets or the porters who traverse the platform. I have known the poor railway clerk doomed to be at his post from eight in the morning until eleven at night during all the seven days of the week, and all this for a very paltry remuneration. While waiting for a train, some time ago, I had the following dialogue with a young man who filled the office of clerk and porter, and attended to the telegraph:—
Myself. Are you the only person employed here?
Clerk. Yes, Sir.
Myself. Are you here many hours?
Clerk. I come before seven in the morning and leave about nine at night.
Myself. Then you have fourteen hours a day?
Clerk. I have two hours to spare in the middle of the day, when I go home to dinner.
Myself. Have you to be here the same time on Sundays as weekdays?
Clerk. Just the same.