No Protestants are more religious than the Swedes and Norwegians. Everybody goes to church; there is theological teaching in the public-schools; and advocacy of liberal religious views was punished in 1888 with imprisonment. No Scandinavian objects, so far as I know, to indoor games, croquet, dancing, or going to the theatre on Sunday; and these amusements are acknowledged to be perfectly proper throughout continental Europe. No one who allows himself any exercise or recreation on Sunday has a right to say that his neighbours do not need more than he does. Lyman Beecher could not preach his best on any day when he did not work hard at sawing wood or shovelling sand in his cellar. There would be less dyspepsia on Monday if there were more exercise on Sunday. Herbert Spencer tells us that "Happiness is the most powerful of tonics. By accelerating the circulation of the blood, it facilitates the performance of every function; and so tends alike to increase health where it exists, and to restore it when it has been lost. Hence the essential superiority of play to gymnastics."
A Bible Dancing Class is said to have been organised, in deference to such facts, in New Jersey by an Episcopalian pastor, who perhaps wishes to accomplish Jeremiah's prediction of the Messianic kingdom, "Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance." Among other liberal clergymen is Brooke Herford, who says: "We want Sunday to be the happiest day in all the week. Keep it free from labour, but free for all quiet, innocent recreations." Rev. Charles Voysey wrote me in 1887, lamenting the immorality arising "from the curse of having nothing to do or nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons and evenings." "Young persons especially," he said, "would be better, and morally more safe, for greater opportunities of innocent pleasure and games at the hours of enforced idleness on the Sunday."
The spirit of the legislators is changing like that of the clergy. The first laws against Sunday amusement were passed by men who thought all pleasure vicious on every day of the week. Our present statutes are kept in force by people who like amusement, and get all they want of it; but who make it almost impossible for their poor neighbours, in order to conciliate ecclesiastical prejudice. "They bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne and lay them on men's shoulders"; but they themselves do not feel the weight.
Whatever may be the advantage of keeping Sunday, it cannot be kept religiously when it is kept compulsorily. Rest from unnecessary labour and business on one day every week may be for the public welfare; but this rest is not made more secure by indiscriminate prohibitions of amusement. The idlest man is the most easily tempted to disturb his neighbours. No man's property is more safe or his personal liberty more secure because his neighbours are liable to be fined for playing golf. Laws against Sunday recreation do not protect but violate individual liberty. A free government has no business to interfere with the right of the citizens to take healthy exercise and innocent amusement whenever they choose.
These considerations would justify a protest, not only against the Sunday laws made by Congress for the District of Columbia, but also against the statutes of every State in the Union, except Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, and Wyoming. "Whoever is present at any sport, game, play, or public diversion, except a concert of sacred music, or an entertainment given by a religious or charitable society, the proceeds of which, if any, are to be devoted exclusively to a religious or charitable purpose," on what is called "the Lord's day" in Massachusetts is liable to a fine of five dollars; the penalty for taking part may be fifty dollars; and the proprietor or manager may be fined as much as five hundred dollars. New Jersey still keeps her old law against "singing, fiddling, or other music for the sake of merriment"; and express prohibitions of "any sport" are still maintained by Connecticut, Maine, and Rhode Island. Prominent among other States which forbid amusements acknowledged innocent on six days of the week, are New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. Many of our States show particular hostility to card-playing, dancing, and theatre-going. The fact that fishing was practised by some of the Apostles on Sunday has not saved this quiet recreation from being prohibited by more than twenty commonwealths.
If every Sunday law were a dead letter, it ought to be repealed, because it tends to bring needed laws into contempt; but among recent results of Sunday legislation are the following. In 1876 some children were fined for playing ball in Rhode Island; so, about this time, in Massachusetts, were a boy for skating, a young man for playing lawn-tennis, and a merchant for fishing with his little son. In 1894 two men were fined $10 each for playing golf on a lonely hill, in the commonwealth just mentioned; five boys under fifteen arrested for playing marbles in New York City; and every member of a baseball club in Pennsylvania fined. In 1895 a man and a boy of fifteen were fined $20 each for fishing in New York; and the attempt of some clergymen, aided by police, to break up a show in Missouri, caused a tumult in which men's heads were broken by clubs, while women and children were trampled underfoot. On the first Sunday that the London galleries and museums were thrown open to their owners, May 24, 1896, two men were shot dead in Attleboro, Mass., by a policeman who had been ordered to break up a clambake. In that same year and State, a manager was fined $70 for allowing Yankee Doodle to be performed in the Boston Theatre; three men were arrested for bowling; half a dozen Jews who had been playing cards in a private house were fined $10 or $20 each, and those who could not pay were sent to jail. Among the Sabbath-breakers arrested in 1897 were a number of newsboys at the national capital, nine golfers in Massachusetts, a young man for holding one end of a rope over which some little girls were skipping in New York City, and also the manager of a show in New Jersey, who spent ten days in jail. Fines were levied in 1898 for playing golf in Connecticut, and twenty-five fishermen were arrested on one Sunday in Buffalo, N. Y. Such are the risks which still accompany innocent and healthy amusements in the Eastern States. Many such arrests are made in order to collect fees, or gratify malice; and neither motive ought to be encouraged by the friends of religion.
Some magistrates in Long Island, N. Y., are believed, while still holding that baseball breaks the Sabbath, to have discovered that golf does not. It is further said that on July 9, 1899, some baseball men who had been playing a Sunday game to a large crowd saved themselves from arrest by using their bats and balls to imitate golfing as soon as a policeman appeared in their grounds.
None of the Sunday laws is so mischievous as the decree of Mrs. Grundy against all forms of recreation not practised by the wealthy and fashionable. These people have so much time on six days of the week for active outdoor sport and indoor public entertainments, that they make little attempt to indulge in such recreations on Sunday. People who have only this one chance of playing ball, or dancing, or going to stereopticon lectures, concerts, and operas, suffer in health by having these recreations made unpopular as well as illegal. The climate of New England and New York, as well as of Great Britain and Canada, has unfortunately been so arranged that there are a great many cold and rainy Sundays, when much time cannot be spent pleasantly in walking or riding. This matters little to people who get all the amusement they want in their parlours. But what becomes of people who have no parlours? For instance, of servant-girls who have no place where they can sing or even laugh? Shop-girls and factory-girls find their little rooms, Sunday after Sunday, too much like prisons. Young men are perhaps even more unfortunate; for they go to the saloon, though this is often closed without any better place of amusement being opened. Why should every week in a democratic country begin with an aristocratic Sunday, a day whose pleasures are mainly for the rich?
Libraries and museums are blessed places of refuge; but "What are they among so many?" The residents of the District of Columbia are particularly unfortunate, as the Smithsonian Museum, National Library, and other buildings, which are open during six days, are kept shut on Sunday. Congress seems to be of the opinion that working people need no knowledge of natural history, except what they can get from sermons about Jonah's whale and Noah's ark. Washington is not the only city whose rich men ought to remember the warning of Heber Newton: "Everything that tends to foster among our working people the notion of class privilege is making against the truest morality in our midst. As they look upon the case, it is the wealthy people, whose homes are private libraries and galleries of art, who protest against the opening of our libraries and museums to those who can afford no libraries and buy no pictures. Sabbatarianism is building very dangerous fires to-day."
We should all be glad to have more intellectual culture given on Sunday. One way of giving it would be for the churches to open public reading-rooms in the afternoon. This would be decidedly for their own interest; and so would be delivery of evening lectures on history, biography, and literature. The Sunday-schools in England found it necessary, even as late as 1850, to give much time to teaching reading and writing as well as the higher branches. Sunday-school rooms in America, which now are left useless after Sunday noon, might be employed in teaching English to German, Italian, and Scandinavian immigrants during the afternoon and evening. Classes might also be formed in vocal music, light gymnastics, American and English history and literature, physiology, sociology, and political economy. Such changes would make our churches all the more worthy of the founder, who "went about doing good."