The Declaration of Independence shows us that this question of liberty was that which the framers of the Constitution were seeking to establish: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
With these words of the Declaration of Independence before us and the provision in Article 6 of the Constitution, namely, thus, “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any public trust under the United States,” and the further guarantee in the first amendment, that “congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”—it is as clear as a sunbeam that all laws seeking to enforce a religious observance of Sunday are unconstitutional, and should not be executed; and where attempts are made to bind religious observance of the day upon Liberal people they should resist it as an intolerable despotism.
The different states of the Union have numerous Sunday laws, which in most cases are a dead letter. Take for instance Massachusetts. In its history seventy-five cases have been decided mostly in favor of a rigid enforcement of its Sunday laws. But both laws and decisions are powerless in controlling the people to observe Sunday as Sabbath.
The present laws of Massachusetts prohibit games, sports, concerts, plays, work, travel, idling, fishing, hunting, buying and selling, but no one feels bound to obey them. Occasionally some new society springs up calling itself “The Society of Law and Order,” and goes to work to set the world right. The first thing to be done is to enforce the Sunday laws, preventing barbers from shaving, milkmen from distributing milk, newsdealers from selling papers, flower girls from selling flowers, cigar stores from selling cigars, croquet players from enjoying on their own premises an hour’s exercise and amusement, steamboats from carrying excursions from the city, ball players from practicing their games, the angler from taking a few trout, and many others from finding rest and recreation in other ways. But these good people who think that the world is out of joint and they are called to set it right, find it a greater task than they had bargained for, and so they soon tire, and the old world wags along as it did before the “Law and Order” society came into existence.
Sunday laws are a solemn farce, and a burning shame. They are a warfare upon the rights of man, in the interest of ancient traditions and modern despotism.
As for travel on the Lord’s day, lo! how the people go their journeys, take their pleasure rides, rattle over the streets with their horse-cars, thunder through the villages past churches with their locomotives, and plow the bogs and coastways with their yachts and excursion steamers. Who questions the right? In the line of sport and diversion, how common such things as boating and fishing and hunting and ball playing and roving over pastures, through woods, picking berries and gathering nuts, and attending many a public entertainment to which an admittance fee is charged and taken for purposes of gain, but whose character, however sacred in name, is as secular as a banjo concert or a play of the drama. No complaint. As regards traffic, do not livery stable keepers let their horses as freely on Sundays as on week days? Do not druggists sell as freely what they possess, whether cigars or whisky, hairbrushes or perfumery? Do not hotels ply their business as freely, always at the tobacco stand and often at the bar? Do not newsboys run as loose with their shouts of “Herald and Gazette?” While if you sail down of a Lord’s day to Martha’s Vineyard, where “religion is the chief concern,” shall you not see cigar stores, fruit stores, toy stores, souvenir stores, etc., undisguisedly open for business, and pedlars hawking canes and gim-cracks unchallenged by any deacon or dignitary? When, therefore, the legislature (of Massachusetts) enacted as late as 1863 that whoever does any manner of work or business on the Lord’s day shall be punished by a fine not exceeding fifty dollars, instead of a fine not exceeding ten dollars, the former penalty, it would seem that the intention must have been to provide a penalty commensurate with the gravest breaches of the statute. What are these, if they be not the running of passenger and freight railway trains, whose mercenary noise makes havoc of all Sunday calm and quiet; the repairing of railway tracks and bridges, the gangs of workmen oft so large and belligerent enough to take a city; the repairing of machinery in shops and mills; the racket of the press turning out Sunday editions of newspapers secular as politics and earthly as a quack medicine advertisement? These truly are open and most gross violations of the law, but against them what murmur has been heard taking the form of prosecution? Nay, the breaches of the law that are prosecuted and have been are for the most part the petty breaches, while the more flagrant offenders, as a rule, have offended with impunity and still so offend.
Considering, therefore, the sturdiness with which the people of the commonwealth resist the law’s repeal, and the indifference with which they treat its violations, it must be confessed that Artemus Ward’s sarcasm, as applied to “prohibition,” applies here with peculiar force—in favor of the law, but against its enforcement. (“The Sunday Law of Massachusetts,” by a member of the Massachusetts bar, p. 29.)
Puck, in its history of the United States, says: “The Puritans instituted many beautiful customs, and they had some very remarkable laws. They provided strict penalties against Sabbath breaking. On Sunday, they decreed that every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the country should go to church three times a day. They forbade reading anything except the Bible, forbade walking in the fields, and generally shut down on amusements. Then they called it the Lord’s day, and thus strove to make the Lord unpopular.”