Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 83, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1920 — INDUSTRY’S ENCROACHMENT ON SUNDAY [ARTICLE]

INDUSTRY’S ENCROACHMENT ON SUNDAY

Are industry and artificial recreation so encroaching on Sunday that it is gradually disappearing as a day of rest? There is something of this alarm in Europe, where, in Spain and Italy, Sunday newspapers have been prohibited as dangerously inciting to an idle community, and, m Poland, the new “Government is seeking to give the rest day the sanction of law. In this country Maryland has prohibited motion-pictures on Sunday, the step receiving the support of Cardinal Gibbons on the ground that motion-pictures are not recreational. Recreation, so-called, often leaves the worker in worse condition than when he stopped his labors on Saturday night. The day he should have passed in trying to “recreate” himself has been spent ,instead, “and the nervous strain of crowds and the screaming hilarity of all sorts of harmful thrillers,” and he is neither morally benefited nor physically rested. Moreover, the numerous places of amusement now required by the six-day toilers demand an increasingly larger army of others who must work on Sunday to provide the necessary entertainment. The Dearborn Independent after pointing out these facts, comments: “There is less of Sunday now than at any time in the world’s history. For every man who takes his pleasure on that day, others must work. The pleasure-filled Sunday is fast/ forcing the appearance of a work-filled Sunday. Tien and twenty years ago we' used to hear that modern industry was the great safe-guard of the Sabbath rest. Fast have hardly verified that statement. Economists may say as much as they please about the necessity of one day of rest in seven, idealists may talk forever about the Sabbath being written into the very constitution of man’s body. There is nowhere in nature a seventh day. Nature knows the month and the year, it knows nothing of the week. The Sabbath began and had its original sanction ip moral and religious considerations are the only noteworthy fact that these same considerations are the only effective ones existing today for the maintenance of the Sunday rest day. The tendency of modern industrialism has been to crowd out the Sunday. We have only to look at" the mill sections of the east to see how far the sevenday week has encroached upon us. When the moral and religious sanctions and safeguards of Sunday begin .to weaken, we can not place much reliance on materilistic interests making very strong efforts to retain what is to them an unprofitable day. The fact that the world stops for a day every seven days—wheels cease their motion, banks close their doors, factory fires are covered, railway schedules are decreased, schools and universities cease their activities, and all civilized mankind straightens up for a day of release from its task —that fact is one of the most astounding facts a man can consider.” The injury from the loss of the abbatical institution may be particular in its effect, for—- “ The man who ought to be most interested in the kind of observance likely to preserve the Sabbath for its higher and most beneficial uses is the workingman. When Sunday begins to vanish, he will be first to lose it. The fact of Sunday makes it possible for -the poor man to have fifty-two days of vacation every year. Take this away, let all the weeks flow into each other as a ceaseless stream of labor, and life would not be worth much. “There are two ways of aboMshing the weekly rest day. One way is to indulge in amusements that are not recreational, and disregard the higher uses of the day: she other way is simply to strike it out of the calendar of the week. The first way makes the second more probable.”