Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Blue Laws in Old New England.
How the Puritans, Seeking and Finding Toleration for Themselves, Become
Themselves Intolerant—Sunday Observance With a Vengeance—Death
Penalty for Disobedient Children.
Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.
People who object to modern laws for the regulation of conduct may, after all, consider themselves fortunate. Sometimes anti-cigarette laws are resented as infringements on personal liberty. But what shall we say of a law under which, in a certain colony, the mere possession of dice or playing-cards was punishable by a fine?
The old "Blue Laws" of Connecticut, or, strictly, of New Haven Colony, are not, in their frequently quoted form, true Blue Laws. Attention was first attracted to the collection by the publication of a "General History of Connecticut" in England in 1781. The author was a Tory minister, the Rev. S.A. Peters, who had been forced to flee from the colony. In the circumstances, it is not remarkable that his volume should bear many signs of spiteful exaggeration.
The Rev. Mr. Peters, however, did not invent the Blue Laws, though he has often been charged with so doing. All but two or three of the forty-five are to be found in the works of earlier writers, or, slightly modified, in the statute books of the various New England colonies. Many of them are not in the New Haven statute books. Those which we quote have been carefully selected from the best obtainable authorities.