SUNDAY IN AMERICA.
THE Sunday Question, so fiercely fought out among our- selves about thirty-five years ago, has suddenly come up in the United States, in a form which will almost involve
the taking of a national plebiscitutn. Congress, it will be remembered, voted a subsidy of £250,000 in aid of the World's
Fair in Chicago, a sum declared by its managers to be essen- tial to its complete success. The vote was not popular, each State slightly grudging a national contribution to the honour and glory of Illinois ; and the recalcitrants, besides reducing the original proposal by one-half, inserted a clause making it a condition of the grant that the Fair should not be open on the first day of the week. Little attention was paid to this at first, but it has gradually become clear that the Exhibition will be a very great affair ; the thousands of persons pecuni- arily interested are irritated at the prospect of losing one- seventh of their receipts ; and the Labour parties have taken up the restrictive clause as one fatal to their clients' enjoyment of the show. Congress is to be asked to repeal the Sunday clause in its Act, sanctioning the subsidy, and the request is to be backed by signed petitions from every township in the Union. The signatures will be counted, and the abstainers, and Congress will, it is believed, or, at least, asserted, repeal or retain the clause, according to the votes of the majority. The Germans, the Italians, the Hungarians, and, in fact, all foreign immigrants, except possibly the Irish, will, of course, be on the side of opening the Fair ; the Churches will be dead on the other side ; and the struggle will reveal, in a very curious way, the comparative strength of the population which adheres, in theory at least, to the old Puritan tradition, and the population which is either foreign in origin, or has been deeply affected as to its manners as well as its religious ideas by the influx from abroad. The contest will, in fact, be one between two social types, and, like all such contests, will be waged with such bitterness that it will, it is asserted, materially affect the struggle for the Presidency.
We are unable to share fully the view of either side, but, on the whole, and considering all the probable results of the vote, we incline to hope that the party opposed to opening the Fair will win. The strength of the argument lies with them, though they base it usually upon ground which can hardly be main- tained. We are unable to believe, in the face of Christ's teaching with regard to the Sabbath, that its observance rests upon one of those direct commands from above which tran- scend reason ; and we see little reason in the idea that there can be a specially religious day. If so, then why not a specially religions hour or year ? The old teaching on the subject, which inculcated the " bitter " observance of the day, seems to us superstitions, and with a direct tendency in it towards that separation between the religions spirit and the daily life of mankind, which, of all the blunders of the English-speaking races, is perhaps the one which has effected the greatest amount of practical mischief. The habit of leaving one's piety behind one in church, as millions of our countrymen do, is thoroughly bad ; and it is directly fostered by the exag- gerated reverence which, up to a very recent period, most religions men professed to entertain for the " Holy Day." Life should be holy, not this day or that, and to sanctify one day in seven is to confess by implication that the other six
far, then, as the American Puritans are moved by a Judaic interpretation of the law, we disagree with them, though we concede fully both their purity of motive, which, indeed, is seldom questioned, and their sincerity, which very often is. That some of them do not live up to their own law is no more proof that the law is unsound, than any other back- sliding of professors is proof that any other law is not binding on the conscience. But we hold that there are at least three reasons for the reasonable observance of the Sunday, especially by a people which has once adopted it, of such strength that we are unable to support any general relaxation of the code hitherto accepted both in England and America.
The first in popularity, though much the weakest, is the value of a rapidly recurring day of rest. This is acknow- ledged on all hands, more especially by all who work hard, and must be substantially true. Mind and body alike require rest at short intervals—or why do we sleep?—and it is expedient that, if toil is to halt, it should halt in all places and among all men at the same time. A practice of the kind maintained by a portion of the community only would be intolerably in- convenient; and, if dictated by a religious motive, would in the end involve a severe burden laid upon them for conscience' sake. The whole experience of mankind shows that universality of this kind can be secured only by compulsion ; and the suspension of toil by law seems, as a measure intended to secure a great social good, unanswerably expedient. Wherever the suspension is left to individual judgment, greed overpowers wisdom, and we arrive, at the best, at the imperfect Continental system, in which half the day is given to labour, and the rest to a relaxation nearly as exhausting. We may doubt, indeed, whether, among Teutonic peoples, with their fierce energy and keen competition and thirst for improved wages, the whole day would not be taken, and the people forced to a ceaseless toil like that of the Chinese, which probably shortens life, and certainly stunts all the faculties not directly necessary to the manual or mental occupation immediately in hand. The need of a day's rest is less in Europe than it was, because Western men are learning to work less hard ; but it is still great, and will probably always remain great, rest for short and divided morsels of time, not having the same recuperative effect.
This, however, though it is the argument which really tells in maintaining Sunday legislation, and carries the work- man's vote usually to that side, is by no means the most serious of the arguments for the observance of Sunday. It does not greatly matter whether men wear themselves out a little earlier or a little later ; and if they found health suffer, they would probably find some other protection for themselves,—as, for example, the races of Southern Europe, and of great divisions of Asia, have done in their frequent holidays. It is much more important that men should obtain, through the compulsory and simultaneous suspen- sion of all usual toil, a fixed break in their permanent pre- occupation of money-getting, a time for reflection and the consideration of things not connected with the gaining of daily bread. The whole tendency of unbroken toil, even when the toil is entirely voluntary, is to dwarf the mind, to take the edge off the intellect, and to make of men as much pure machines as their structure will allow them to be made. No one who toils hard and incessantly can think with the grip which belongs to thinking at leisure, can make his thoughts efficient enough to control his inner will, or can " meditate," that is, indulge in abstract thought, undisturbed by external surroundings. If man is to be a thinking entity as well as a working one—and we suppose that is the object of all who desire the progress of the species—he must have a period of leisure, and it is well for him not only that the leisure should be more continuous than it can be every day, but that it should be unbroken by any ordinary call of duty, or, we are tempted to add, by any extraordinary summons to amuse- ment. The dull, monotonous, tiresome English and American Sunday does secure that period of exemption from daily duty, and we have as yet discovered no social arrangement which secures it so well. It is, moreover, used to an extent which those who are impatient of the English Sunday are unwise to forget. It is a minority which entirely wastes, from the civilising point of view, the day of rest. The thousands stand about at the street corners and drink, not the millions. The 80 per cent., or whatever it is, of men and women who do not involve or require the same religious obligations. So really work, use Sunday to think in, however feebly, to
read, however little, to cultivate those domesticities,—the mutual understanding, for example, between parents and children,—for which the week-day affords so little opportunity. An enormous section of the population — and, on the whole, the best section—devotes part of the day to some religious obser- vances, or thinks that it ought to devote it, —that is, acknow- ledges to itself, however unfruitfully, that man has something else to do besides earning bread ; that, when he has earned to his content, he has still not fulfilled his destiny. That break in life is good, even if it only gives men and women a chance of rising out of their usual condition, and we should be sorry to see it threatened by a vote which, though of little consequence in itself, except to the thousands who must serve the Chicago Fair, and the railways, and the crowds brought by those railways to be fed and accommodated and kept in order, will undoubtedly affect the imagination of the whole American community, and give a severe shock to the habit of releasing one day in every seven for mental occupation.
But the gravest reason of all remains, in our judgment, for not voting that the Fair be open every day. We are unable to admit that the observance of Sunday, as such observance is usually understood by pions Englishmen, is of peremptory religious obligation ; but we are by no means sure that with its disappearance a great deal of religious feeling would not disappear also. It ought not to be so, but we must take the world as we find it; and as we find it, we find that the mass of mankind need observances to attune their minds to religious thought, that in prosperous Protestant countries they have cut down observances almost to the vanishing point, and that, if the good consent to abolish Sunday also, there will, for an enormous proportion either of the American or the English people, be next to no external stimulus to religion left. They could do without it, no doubt, if they were different—the Gentile disciples were probably generations before they acquired the habit of periodic pausing in work—but, being what they are, the English and Americans could not, without danger of a grave increase in the materialism which already envelops their minds. They are an earthy people by their own consent, and, with nothing external to prick their consciences or to remind them of higher things, they would go on from year's end to year's end, as the Chinese do, thinking only of wages, work, and the occasional distractions which we call, for want of a better general term, amusements. That is a piggish life. Whether we are believers or not, and especially if we are strong deniers of belief, we must all recognise that the Whence and Whither is the biggest subject of thought, the one which has had the most influence for good or evil, the one about which it is most needful to have definite opinions. The Secularist admits that as fully as the Calvinist or the Catholic, and in the strength of that admis- sion we are justified in pleading that the further materialisa- tion of life among English-speaking peoples cannot be a good thing. If it is not, then we contend that the abolition of the laws which arrest work on Sunday is not good either; and it is towards that abolition that the efforts of the Chicago managers are tending. They mean no harm, we dare say, and we should not dream of accusing them of impiety ; but they are putting the clock back.
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