THE WASTES OF MODERN CIVILIZATION. 625 



For what else is the tyranny of the laws by which nine tenths 

 of our fellow-citizens are robbed of their scant chance of recrea- 

 tion and obliged at the expense of their mental and physical 

 health to toil like criminals, whose only alternative of labor is the 

 dreary inactivity of their prison-cells — all in order to retain a 

 conventional mark of deference to the joy-hating insanity of the 

 middle ages — or, perhaps, to enhance by the charm of contrast 

 the prerogatives of the privileged few, whose abundance of leisure 

 days enables them to dispense with the blessing of a free Sun- 

 day ? 



It is true that the rigor of mediaeval ethics has been modified 

 in several important respects. The duty of abstaining from work 

 and relying on prayer has been abrogated in favor of our tax- 

 paying national industries. The duty of despising the danger of 

 defilement by things that enter the mouth has been generally 

 remitted in favor of candidates for the temperance vote. The 

 obligation of despising the vanities of secular science does not 

 prevent the Kev. Tollemach-Tollemach from collecting his tithes 

 by telephone ; but the duty of renunciation, of submissive absti- 

 nence from worldly and physical enjoyments, is still enforced at 

 the expense of every laborer whose financial circumstances pre- 

 clude the luxury of extra-Sabbatarian leisure days. 



In the course of the last twenty years several hundred appeals 

 for the abrogation of our anachronistic blue laws have been 

 calmly ignored as below the notice of legislators engaged in such 

 important reforms as the dredging of Catfish Bayou, though it 

 might be questioned if the total amount of misery entailed on 

 our workingmen by the systematic suppression of public recrea- 

 tion has ever been surpassed by the results of the most inhuman 

 alliance of mediaeval bigotry and despotism. The Spanish Inqui- 

 sition enforced its mandates regardless alike of fear and pity; 

 but its victims were selected from a class forming, after all, only 

 a small fraction of the total population — one scapegoat, per- 

 haps, in a herd of ten thousand — while at least a hundred-fold 

 proportion of our countrymen feel the galling yoke of the Sab- 

 bath despots. The Scotch ascetics of David Hume's time filled 

 their churches by a system of penal statutes which made financial 

 and social ruin almost the only alternative of conformity; but 

 the Caledonian peasant who had passed a week among the flocks 

 of his Highland home might easily endure a day of confinement 

 in the man-pen of his kirk, while the bigots of our manufacturing 

 communities enforce their asceticism upon men who need recrea- 

 tion and outdoor sports as they need food and sunlight, and 

 whose numbers include thousands for whom the promise of a 

 post-mortem Utopia has lost its compensating value. 



A few Sundays ago I accompanied a friend on a stroll across a 



VOL. XXXV. — 40 



