Our Sunday.
Yet which the day of all the seven
To our sour lives adds sourer leaven,
And leaves poor folk most far from heaven?
Our Sunday.
The persistence of the Sabbatarian instinct, even where it was disregarded, is illustrated in the picture of the young lady on a railway platform asking her grandfather to hide their rackets: "We needn't show everybody that we are going to play lawn tennis on a Sunday afternoon."
When in 1888 Sunday boating was allowed in the parks after church time, Punch applauds "George Ranger" and Mr. David Plunket for the act but not the language of the order, which he condemns as "Pharisaical trash." In the same year a largely signed petition was laid before the Upper House of Convocation of Canterbury protesting against the increasing pursuit of Sunday pastime by the "upper and fashionable classes of Society." Punch ridicules the vagueness of the protest against "amusing programmes of fun and frolic," and sums up in these words:—
Our English Sunday is none too lovely or lively an institution, but as yet neither the upper nor the lower classes of English Society have shown any tendency, publicly, to desecrate it. When they do, it will be time enough, if not for the Upper House of the Convocation of Canterbury, at least for the Public Opinion of the country to express itself upon the matter. Meantime, grandmotherly interference had better let it alone.
Punch had evidently modified his earlier views as to the saving grace of Sunday dullness in England as compared with the Continental Sunday. The Bill for the Sunday closing of public-houses introduced in 1889 is dealt with in detail and at great length. The cartoon of "Sunday à la Pharisee" aims at showing that the habitual toper will not suffer, but that the decent working-man will be incommoded. It is rather unfortunate, however, that the latter is shown sending his little girl to the public-house for his beer. The accompanying verses are founded on a wonderful fulmination in The Times:—
"To hedge people round with petty restrictions instead of teaching them nobility of conduct and a worthy use of liberty, is the perennial resource of shallow and incompetent reformers.... A depraved and servile human nature, cribbed, cabined and confined by an infinity of minute regulations enforced by the policemen, is their reading of the social problem.... A small minority occasionally injure themselves with bad liquor on Sunday, and these reformers can think of nothing better than to forbid the entire Community to drink on Sundays at all."