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andanimated debate. The final decision of the Congress was adverse to the 
opening, on the ground mainly that it is undesirable to augment Sunday 
work. The matter is one on which the working classes have the best right to 
speak. It is for their convenience that the opening has been proposed, and, 
if they think that the balance of advantage is against it, there is no more to 
be said, and the verdict must be accepted by those who profess to speak for 
them.” 
Let me add a few facis from continental Europe bearing on 
the point before us : 
On the Continent of Europe the great majority of workingmen 
have to labor the whole ora part of Sunday. There is no law to 
protect them in claiming their right to rest: But they are by no 
meaus quiet under this state of things. Numerous societies of work- 
ingmen and their friends have been formed for the purpose of recoy- 
ering the right to rest one day in seven. 
In Germany, in 1865, the Printers’ Society of Berlin appealed 
to all labor societies and well-disposed employers to join them in 
agitating against the custom of Sunday work in industrial estab- 
lishmeunts. 
The ‘‘Socialistic Labor Party,” formed at Gotha in 1875, made 
it as one of its foremost demands that Sunday labor be prohibited 
by the State. 
Petitions from workingmen and others have been repeatedly 
sent to the German Parliament for a law forbidding Sunday work in 
factories except in cases of necessity. 
On the 25th of April last (1885) a grand mass meeting was held 
in Berlin to favor a law to close all industrial and trading establish- 
ments on Sunday, at which were present delegations from various 
trade societies and a committee of the Parliament. The matter has 
since been discussed in Parliament, and it is said that the Govern- 
ment proposes to make an exhaustive inquiry into the whole subject 
of Sunday labor. 
In Austria a similar agitation for several years stad has resulted 
in the recent passage of a law stopping work on Sunday, but a large 
number of trades and professions are excepted from its provisions. 
In France the old law forbidding common labor on Sunday, 
which had long been a dead letter, was formally repealed in 1880. 
In 1881 the more intelligent French Socialists organized the 
“ Workingmen’s Society,” the first article of whose economical pro- 
gramme is legal “ prohibition of more than six days of labor in a 
week,” together with a shortening of the hours of a day’s work. 

