The colonists were homogeneous in race, they carefully drove out all who were antagonistic in religion; the communities were small and everybody knew every body else's business. What puzzles the casual investigator is this: Why were blue laws needed in such communities? Yet, as Mr. Myers demonstrates in the amplest detail, not only was stringent sumptuary and moral legislation passed from the very beginning, but the court records show constantly increasing violations, and the laws became ever stricter and stricter, seemingly without producing the desired effect. This must have been a sad trial to the heart of these zealous legislators, who found imprisonment, whipping, the stocks, fines, ostraeism, and even the threat of death alike unavailing — but who, nevertheless, kept on passing more laws.

One point on which the clergy everywhere in the American colonies were exceedingly sensitive was the criticism to which they were subjected, and from Virginia issued stern decrees protecting those who occupied pulpits. The other colonies soon followed. Of course, with such decrees were joined laws prohibiting any divergence in dogma from the faith accepted in any particular colony. In order to make certain that nothing of an offensive nature was said in any publication, a law was passed in Massachusetts placing all publications under the censorship of two ministerial "overseers of the press." But the result was a spirit of deep-seated opposition that found vent in the overthrow of the rule of the clergy during the American Revolution, as described by Mr. Myers. More

even during the life of the censorship, clergymen found that they could not control matters. Broadsides and pamphlets lampooning them and their practices suddenly appeared from mysterious sources, and in Pennsylvania, where there was likewise a board of censors, juries failed to convict. Finally came the classic Zenger case in New York, the result of which was the establishment of freedom of the press in America.

In Virginia and in many other States church attendance was compulsory, and in New England Sunday began on Saturday. At three o'clock of the latter day all labor was suspended, in order that everybody might spend the rest of the day "in catechizing and preparation for the Sabbath as the minister may direct." Preachers, it was further enacted, were not to be interrupted in their sermons. No one was to leave a church till the services were ended. Spies were appointed to hale Sabbath offenders to court.

Children were subject to endless restrictions, and the idea that play was healthy would have horrified the Puritans. Playing, sauntering, or "sporting" on Sunday was forbidden. Swimming on that day was prohibited, as was also "all unnecessary and unseasonable walking in the streets and fields." In 1659 Massachusetts made the observance of Christmas a punishable offense. Social parties were forbidden on Sunday evenings, fast days, and Thursday lecture days.

In 1669 smoking on the Sabbath was prohibited.

case.

Mr. Myers makes it clear that the only justification for such laws would be an increase in morality and a decrease in crime. The passing of the laws should in the course of a few years have made them unnecessary, as a consequence of the improved conditions they brought. But, as he shows, the contrary was the The laws in general had to be followed up by others, more and more severe in terms. Crime, immorality, and ethical disintegration increased, as the preambles to the later laws frequently testify. There was sometimes outward conformity for a while, but often the laws were contemptuously disregarded or means were found of evading them through legal technicalities.

We do not condemn the Puritan for his strict adherence to religious principles and religious obligations, but for his disposition to employ the civil magistrate to use force and law in religion

when gospel methods failed. He made Christianity legalistic instead of inspirational. He made the church a thing to be despised instead of loved. He sought to drive men into the kingdom of God with his big stick instead of winning

them by love and entreaty. He held th Bible in one hand and his "big stick in the other to enforce its doctrines, a Saint-Gaudens' famous statue of th Puritan indicates on the front cover o our magazine.

U

apologist for the blue laws, admits the facts substantially as here set forth.

It is true that the Puritans never en acted a law which said in so many words that a man must not kiss his wife on Sunday, but they did enact a law forbidding "all lewd and lascivious and unseemly conduct on Sunday, and this law was con

PON a number of occasions we have made reference in these, columns to the blue laws of New England, assuming that they actually existed. These laws are now denied by a large number of people, especially by the protagonists of Sunday laws. It is boldly and confidently asserted. that the so-called blue laws were the mental creation of a Rev. Samuel Peters, a loyalist, who fleeing from the wrath of the colonists in early Revolutionary days, returned to England, where he sought to stir up

feeling against the

colonists by an exaggerated account of their administration of civil affairs.

But careful research reveals the fact that practically every one of the prohibitions mentioned by Mr. Peters, while not worded exactly as he gave them from memory, has been found in the court records or on the statute books of the Massachusetts and Connecticut colonies. Even Rev. J. Hammond Trumbull, an

strued to forbid kissing in public on the first day of the week. The courts having so interpreted and administered the Sunday statute, it would seem that Mr. Peters was warranted in say ing that such was the law.

The March, 1921, number of Current History, a reputable magazine published by the New York Times Company, gives from the pen of Frank Parker Stockbridge an interesting historical account of this much-discussed subject, "Blue Laws in America." A portion of this article we quote as follows:

"Most famous among these earlier codes, if not the most important, were the blue laws

of Connecticut, first given public prominence by the Rev. Samuel Peters in his 'General History of Connecticut,' originally published in London in 1781.

"The Rev. Mr. Peters was a clergyman of the Church of England who went out to the Connecticut colony in the middle of the eighteenth century. As a loyalist he found himself unpopular in the troublous times preeeding the American Revolution, and in 1774 he fled the colony and returned to England. When his book appeared seven years later, it was greeted with a storm of denunciation in America. Patriotism and State pride have led so many commentators to deny the existence of the blue laws cited by Mr. Peters that it has become the current belief that his catalogue of statutory offenses alleged to prevail in the colony of Connecticut was a satirical fabrication out of whole cloth. But while it is literally true that none of the blue laws ever stood on the Connecticut statute books in the precise form in which the reverend historian quotes them, he acknowledged that he had never seen them in print and was setting them down from memory,-extensive research by Walter F. Prince and other historians bears out the statement that laws substantially to the same effect were in existence and enforced, either in Connecticut or in the neighboring theistic commonwealth of Massachusetts. Hearing of the punishment meted out under these laws, and so having them fixed in his memory, it does not discredit Mr. Peters to point out that some of the laws he attributes to Connecticut were actually the laws of Massachusetts.

Los Angeles Times

"Typical Blue Laws

"This last was deduced by Mr. Peters, apparently, from the record of the imposition of a fine of ten shillings by the Colony of Massachusetts upon a certain seafaring man and his wife when, his ship arriving in port on a Sunday, she met him . . . and, forgetful for the moment of the reverence due the day, greeted him with a kiss, to the desecration of the Sabbath. "The two other blue laws quoted were typical of the Sunday observance statutes that prevailed in nearly all the American colonies in the eighteenth century, and continued in several States for a long time after the Revolution."

"Such of the forty-eight blue laws cited by Mr. Peters as relate to Sunday observance he set down thus:

"No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and fro from meeting.

This tells only part of the real truth. With the exception of California and Oregon, all our Ameri

can States have modified rather than repudiated the old Puritanical laws. This is especially true of our Sunday legislation.

The older States, with the exception of Louisiana, modeled their Sunday laws more or less closely after the English law of 29 Charles II. Some years ago, in obedience to a mandate from the people, the California Legislature repealed the Sunday law. Five years ago the people of Oregon did the same. Clearly the people are gainst civilly enforced religion.

They admire and honor the early colonists for what they were, but they will not follow their example in enforcing religious opinions and practices by civil law.

bills to be considered by a legislative body; it was introduced into the California Legislature, Jan. 21, 1921, and proposes to prohibit the keeping open of stores, workshops, and places of business on Sunday. Section 5 of this bill is as follows:

"Every person, firm, corporation or association violating any of the provisions of this law shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $500 or by imprisonment in the county jail for a period not exceeding six months, or by both such fine and imprisonment.”

Does not this give some reason for the "antiblue fellows" to fear that 66 some one will bind them hand and foot and east them into jail" The violators of this law might not be bound hand and foot, but they certainly would be cast into jail if their fines were not paid. That is the avowed purpose of all such legislation, and if the legislatures or the people of the different States yield to the demand of the Lord's Day Alliance and the National Reform Association and enact the measures demanded by them, those who will not obey their mandates will be fined and imprisoned.

We sometimes wonder if the good people of our nation are ready to see their fellow citizens fined or cast into prison for selling bread on Sunday, or the iceman for selling ice on that day. To take from a man his time or his honest money which he has honestly earned because of doing an honest deed on any day of the week, is tyranny, it is un-American and unjust. No one who has a right conception of the golden rule, or of inalienable rights, will demand such power and treat his fellow man in any such way.

Those who desire to keep Sunday or any other day sacred, can do so without a civil law. That is well demonstrated by a respectable minority who observe Saturday. These people, because of their religious convictions, surrender the busiest day of the week and devote it to the service of God. They ask no law compelling others to conform to their ideas of religion. The commandments of God are enough for them, and in their desire

to please their Maker they observe this commandment, granting to others the heaven-born right of dissent. The Christian has all the power of heaven to enable him to live his religion. He does not need the power of civil government to enforce his religion upon either himself or his fellow men. No religious controversy can be settled by the civil government. No church which has the power of God back of it will ever ask the civil government to enforce its dogmas, and no church which expects to maintain the right relationship with God will seek the civil government for support. The Master Himself said, "If any man hear My words, and believe not, I judge him not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world."

"In the course of a Sunday evening sermon Dr. R. S. Eastman, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Chico, Butte County, took occasion to speak of the efforts being made in certain quarters to take the sun out of Sunday.' He declared that churchgoers needed no such restrictive laws as those proposed to keep them from choosing amusements in preference to the worship of God, and that non-churchgoers would hardly have their views changed by the enactment of such laws. But it is not to give labor a day of rest that clergymen are campaigning for Sunday laws, for labor has its day of rest now. It is to bring people into churches that cannot be brought in otherwise, and the clergyman who is frank will admit it. You will always find the less successful among the ministry making the most fuss about Sunday amusements. The man of brains in the pulpit is willing to match those brains as a drawing card against any movie show or baseball game."

THE W. C. T. U. of Milwaukee, Wis., requested the district attorney of that city to enforce all the Sunday laws. District Attorney Winfred C. Zabel replied: "Milwaukee would be a graveyard on Sunday if the demands of the W. C. T. U. were granted. There would be no need for new legislation."