Every man or woman shall repair in the morning to the divine service and sermon preached upon the Sabbath Day, and in the afternoon to divine service and catechising, upon pain for the first fault to lose their provision and allowance for the whole week following (provisions were held in common at that day); for the second to lose the said allowance and also to be whipt; for the third to suffer death. Whipping meant that the offender shall by order of such justice or justices, receive on the bare back ten lashes well laid on.
In Massachusetts the law provided various penalties, according to the gravity of the offense. Ten shillings or be whipped for profaning the Lord’s day; death for presumptuous Sunday desecration; fines for traveling on the Lord’s day; boring tongue with red-hot iron, sitting upon the gallows with a rope around the offender’s neck, etc., at the discretion of the Court of Assizes and General Goal Delivery. (“Acts and Laws of the Province of Mass. Bay 1692-1719,” p. 110.) It was pretty much the same in Connecticut, where the laws explicitly prohibited “walking for pleasure,” while Maryland provided “death without benefit of clergy for blasphemy.” Practically every English colony had similar laws and ordinances. We read in Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia” (1788, p. 167):
The first settlers were immigrants from England, of the English Church, just at a point of time when it was flushed with a complete victory over the religion of other persuasions. Possessed, as they became, of the power of making, administering and executing the laws, they showed equal intolerance in this country with their Presbyterian brethren who had emigrated to the Northern government.... Several acts of the Virginia Assembly, of 1659, 1662 and 1693, had made it penal in parents to refuse to have their children baptized, and prohibited the unlawful assembling of Quakers, had made it penal for any master of a vessel to bring a Quaker into the State, had ordered those already there, and such as should come hereafter, to be imprisoned until they should abjure the country—provided a milder penalty for the first and second return, but death fortheir third. If no capital executions took place here, as did in New England, it was not owing to the moderation of the Church, or spirit of the Legislature, as may be inferred from the law itself; but to historical circumstances which have not been handed down to us.
William H. Taft, when President, said: “We speak with great satisfaction of the fact that our ancestors came to this country to establish freedom of religion. Well, if you are to be exact, they came to establish freedom of their own religion, and not the freedom of anybody else’s religion. The truth is that in those days such a thing as freedom of religion was not understood.”
Just what American freedom was at the time that English influence was at high tide, unleavened by the liberal and tolerant ideas brought over from the European continent, may be inferred from the following extract from the “Columbian Sentinel” of December, 1789, quoted in “American State Papers:”
The tithingman also watched to see that “no young people walked abroad on the even of the Sabbath,” that is, on the Saturday night (after sundown). He also marked and reported all those who “lye at home” and others who “prophanely behaved,” “lingered without dores at meeting times on the Lord’s Daie,” all “the sons of Belial strutting about, setting on fences, and otherwise desecrating the day.” These last two offenders were first admonished by the tithingman, then “sett in stocks,” and then cited before the Court. They were also confined in the cage on the meeting house green, with the Lord’s Day sleepers. The tithingman could arrest any who walked or rode too fast in pace to and from meeting, and he could arrest any who “walked or rode unnecessarily on the Sabbath.” Great and small alike were under his control.
Even General Washington while President was interfered with on one occasion by “the tithingman.”
Propaganda in the United States.
Propaganda in the United States.—It has been charged that though a large number of American newspapers were controlled in England through Lord Northcliffe, a joint commission of English, French and Belgian propagandists was deemed necessary early in the war to create public sentiment in the United States in favor of intervention on the side of the European Allies through the process of “retaining” a number of prominent speakers as attorneys and employing a staff of well-known writers, novelists and poets to arouse us from our state of neutrality. A similar policy was followed in other countries, and in the course of an interview with Vicente Blasco Ibanez, the Spanish novelist, author of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (in which the Germans are pictured in most repellent color), the New York “Times” of October 18, 1919, printed the following significant paragraph:
Ibanez said the actual writing of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” was done in four months in time spared from his official work of writing a weekly chronicle of the war and directing the Allied propaganda as an agent of the French Government.