You are therefore, my Lord, about to inflict incalculable evils and injuries upon a large portion of the most valuable of your fellow citizens. The working classes are very important members of the commonwealth. We cannot all be kings and queens; and trade, commerce, agriculture, manufactures, railways and domestic life, would be in a very pitiable condition if all were lords, squires, great capitalists, and Crystal Palace speculators. Our clerks, operatives, peasants, hard handed fustain jackets, smock frocks, &c., make the wealth and the comforts of the nation.
“Princes and peers may flourish or may fade—
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
If once destroyed, can never be supplied.”
Thanks to our Sabbaths, Sabbath Schools, Bibles, and Gospel Ministry, we have in this favoured land of ours, the most industrious, upright, contented, and moral population under heaven. It may suit speculators in State Education to malign the working classes, and to exaggerate the ignorance and vice that may exist among us, but still after making every just allowance for our intellectual and moral defects, we are prepared to prove, that there is no country on the globe which can boast of a race of operatives and peasants equal to the English. And are these the men and women who are to be robbed of their Sabbaths and the comforts of home? Is this the return which lords and gentlemen are about to make for their large revenues and peaceful mansions? It is no use, my Lord, to say that you only propose to injure, corrupt, and destroy a few, for the benefit of the many, because the country may have all necessary amusement without Sabbath desecration and without inflicting an evil on anyone; but if it could not, you have no right to rob even ONE man of his day of rest, his health and his home, to increase the wealth or minister to the recreation of others; and therefore, instead of sanctioning this injustice, it is the solemn duty of the Government to enact such laws as shall secure to the labourer full exemption from toil on every seventh day. Works of absolute necessity and deeds of charity and mercy may be attended to. All requisite domestic duties may be performed: the sick and the young may be nursed: the ox and the ass may be led away to watering: or if either fall into a pit, it may be helped out; but then these occupations and occurrences will interfere very little with the rest of the Sabbath, and therefore can bear no comparison with continuous employment on that sacred day during the whole year.
Should your Lordship, or any of my readers, be doubtful respecting the physical evils arising from Sabbath labour, I may again refer to the Blue Book, containing the Parliamentary Evidence respecting Sabbath occupations. The testimony of the medical men and especially of Dr. Farr on this point is particularly worthy of notice. I may also quote the following words of another well known London Physician of long experience and great practice. The venerable Dr. Conquest of Finsbury Square, in a letter to the churchwardens of St. Luke’s, says,
“I regret my inability to be at the vestry this evening. Had it been in my power to be there, I should have endeavoured to prove, as a medical man, that it is absolutely necessary for the human constitution to have one day in seven for rest, because without it, its powers become enfeebled and impaired.—Daily exertion and excitement and fatigue during the week, without this one day’s rest, prematurely break down the strength and vigour of the animal system, shorten life, and deprive old age of that energy and cheerfulness which usually attend it in those who have rested from mental and bodily toil on the Lord’s-day.”
There is not a physiologist or medical man in the country who understands the physical and metaphysical nature of man, but would subscribe to these sentiments. Here then you are shown that health, corporeal, mental and moral energy, and longevity, depend upon the rest of the Sabbath, and consequently that disease and premature death will arise from Sunday labour, and yet we are told that we must not legislate on this subject because it is a religious question. We grant that it is a religious question, but then it is a physical and social question also. Are not legislative enactments on murder, theft, on the cholera, factory labour and poisons, physical and religious questions at the same time? Yea, are they not religious because they are physical? Is it not a social, a physical, and a religious duty to preserve life and protect the rights of the labourer from the injustice of the oppressor? No one has a greater dread of over legislation, or legislation where conscience is concerned, than the writer of this Letter, but then who would say that legislating against murder and robbery must be shunned out of deference to the consciences of murderers and thieves; or because the duty to avoid these crimes is a religious duty; and therefore in making any laws respecting them we should violate the great principles of Religious Liberty, as though it was a part of Religious Liberty to grant to all sorts of assassins, plunderers, and speculators, the liberty to defraud and slay their brethren and dependents? Dr. Conquest, Dr. Farr, and many other skilful and experienced physiologists have proved, and are prepared to prove, that Sabbath labour shortens life, and this fact alone renders legislation on the subject the solemn duty of every humane government, whether that government consists of pagans, Jews, Turks, infidels, or Christians.
The remarks given above from Dr. Conquest have been borne out by all history and observation. Some years ago, Mr. Wilberforce endeavoured to persuade certain lawyers and barristers that Sunday occupations and consultations would shorten their days. They laughed at his fanaticism, sneered at him as a “Saint,” and were quite ready to “Charivari” him; but all these mockers died before their time. Some of them became melancholy imbeciles, and more than one committed suicide. We cannot, my Lord, violate the laws of God, whether written on the digestive organs, muscles and brain, or in the Bible, without having to pay the dire penalty of rebellion against the benevolent regulations of our heavenly Father.
We have heard a great deal of late concerning the Anglo-Saxon race, and its native vigour, enterprise, intelligence, &c. All our greatness has been attributed to physical causes, and these causes have been supposed to originate in the purity of our race. But the argument is absurd, because we are the most mixed and mongrel people under heaven. We have all sorts of blood in our veins. We are a compound of Ancient Britons, Romans, Scots, Irish, Saxons, Danes, Normans, French, Germans, Phenicians, &c., &c. And yet we boast of being Anglo-Saxons!! There is more scepticism than science in this vaunting. Men are unwilling to do homage to Christianity, and “to render to God the things that are God’s.” We owe all to the Bible and the Sabbath. The former, by circulating sound principles among us, has given us vigorous minds, and the latter by the repose of one day in seven, has imparted to us healthy physical constitutions. The rest from toil and worldly anxiety; the soothing associations of leisure, home, moral principle, and religious hope, have wrought wonders on our muscles, nerves, brain, and digestive organs, and thus have given us vigorous bodies; intrepid, enterprising, and persevering minds; moral courage; and honourable, humane, and philanthropic sentiments. What made the sturdy men of the Reformation and of the Commonwealth, but the Bible and the Sabbath? And if Anglo-Saxon must be a synonym for physical vigour and moral courage, then history, science, philosophy, and religion allow us to say, that the Bible and the Sabbath would make Anglo-Saxons of the Celts, the French, the Germans, the Chinese, and of all the world. Our venerable ancestors, both Episcopalians and Puritans, who built up the British constitution and rendered it the wonder, the glory, and terror of the world, saw that man must have a day of rest, and therefore made it a statute of the realm that labour should cease on the Lord’s-day; and we owe our national preeminence to their wisdom and piety. You ought therefore, my Lord, to hesitate before you remove those “ancient landmarks which your fathers set up”; for you may rest assured that as soon as you break up the good old Sabbath observance habits of our forefathers, and introduce, in its stead, Sunday labour and dissipation, you will hear no more of the vigour of the Anglo-Saxon race; for with a continental Sabbath you will have continental frivolity, effeminacy, fickleness, and revolutions; and it may be well for your Lordship to consider whether under such a change the nobility of England will share better than the clergy, the gentry, the nobles and princes of France under the reign of terror. The Bible and the Sabbath, if duly studied and observed, would have saved that country from all the melancholy and frightful calamities which it has had to suffer during the last sixty or seventy years.
Everyone, my Lord, who advocates Sunday labour, is not only an enemy to the working man, but an adversary to the country at large. It is impossible for such a man to be a patriot, because he endeavours to undermine the physical and moral vigour of the empire. It is no use to say, that in opening the Crystal Palace on the Sabbath, you advocate the amusement and not the labour of the masses; because you are going to doom one body of your countrymen to toil that they may enrich and please others. And depend upon it, when it is generally understood that railway directors can have seven days’ labour for fifteen or twenty shillings a week, other masters will exact the same hard terms from their workpeople. They will naturally ask, Who are we that we should pay as much for six days, as the railway lords do for seven? The certain result to the working classes will be increased labour and diminished wages; and thus under this pretence of giving Sunday recreation to operatives and others, one of the most deadly injuries will be inflicted upon them. They have often been duped by designing demagogues, but now it seems Conservative Lords and Radical Dissenters are to be their deceivers. Of old Herod and Pontius Pilate were made friends when the Son of God was to be crucified; and in our time, we have lords and plebeians, Conservatives, Whigs, Radicals, Chartists, Atheists, debauchees, Episcopalians and ultra-Dissenters—all leagued together to rob the poor brethren of Jesus Christ, of their day of rest, and the ten thousand blessings connected therewith. We congratulate you, my Lord, on your companions, coadjutors, and fellow labourers: though we know that you must not hope much from the certain result of your zeal. It is often said that our Norman nobility have never naturalized themselves in this foreign land, and the present effort to destroy the physical and moral greatness of the nation by Sunday labour will go far to prove that they have not as yet become English patriots. Sabbath amusement for one class will be Sabbath slavery to another; and as this Sabbath labour and desecration increases, the nation will fall and will most certainly involve the nobility in its ruin.
Much is said of recreation and comfort for the working classes, but we must be just before we are generous, and not forget the rights and happiness of those who are to be worked. I have before said that England owes much to its domestic circles and its homes. “Home! sweet Home!” is an air which charms everyone among us; but do away with the Sabbath, and you destroy the English home. “Mother,” said a child, “you seem so happy always on a Sunday, I wish it were Sunday every day.” “You are always better on a Sunday when father’s at home,” said a little girl to her sick mother. Another said, “Oh, we are so uncomfortable to-day, it don’t seem like Sunday, because father has been at work all day, and has not cleaned himself.” “Don’t the sun always shine brighter on the Sunday? and it is never such nasty wet rain on a Sunday as on other days,” exclaimed another group of children. But the sick wife of the railway servant, and the fond children, are to know nothing of these Sabbath endearments. Sunday suns and Sunday rains will be week day suns and rains to them, and this will continue from year’s end to year’s end. Really, my Lord, as a religious individual, and consequently a very feeling, sympathetic, and humane man, you ought to hesitate before you resolve to destroy domestic ties and affections to which your country owes so much of its happiness, prosperity, and greatness. Your good Lady, the Duchess of Sutherland, and others, are calling loudly upon the Americans to pity the poor negro, and we beg your Lordship to have some compassion for these intended Crystal Palace slaves, and not allow their homes to be broken up and their wives to be as widows and their children orphans.