Sunday Under Three Heads | Page 6

We need go no farther than St. Giles's, or Drury Lane, for sights and
scenes of a most repulsive nature. Women with scarcely the articles of
apparel which common decency requires, with forms bloated by
disease, and faces rendered hideous by habitual drunkenness--men
reeling and staggering along--children in rags and filth--whole streets
of squalid and miserable appearance, whose inhabitants are lounging in
the public road, fighting, screaming, and swearing--these are the
common objects which present themselves in, these are the well-known
characteristics of, that portion of London to which I have just referred.
And why is it, that all well-disposed persons are shocked, and public
decency scandalised, by such exhibitions?
These people are poor--that is notorious. It may be said that they spend
in liquor, money with which they might purchase necessaries, and there
is no denying the fact; but let it be remembered that even if they
applied every farthing of their earnings in the best possible way, they
would still be very--very poor. Their dwellings are necessarily
uncomfortable, and to a certain degree unhealthy. Cleanliness might do
much, but they are too crowded together, the streets are too narrow, and

the rooms too small, to admit of their ever being rendered desirable
habitations. They work very hard all the week. We know that the effect
of prolonged and arduous labour, is to produce, when a period of rest
does arrive, a sensation of lassitude which it requires the application of
some stimulus to overcome. What stimulus have they? Sunday comes,
and with it a cessation of labour. How are they to employ the day, or
what inducement have they to employ it, in recruiting their stock of
health? They see little parties, on pleasure excursions, passing through
the streets; but they cannot imitate their example, for they have not the
means. They may walk, to be sure, but it is exactly the inducement to
walk that they require. If every one of these men knew, that by taking
the trouble to walk two or three miles he would be enabled to share in a
good game of cricket, or some athletic sport, I very much question
whether any of them would remain at home.
But you hold out no inducement, you offer no relief from listlessness,
you provide nothing to amuse his mind, you afford him no means of
exercising his body. Unwashed and unshaven, he saunters moodily
about, weary and dejected. In lieu of the wholesome stimulus he might
derive from nature, you drive him to the pernicious excitement to be
gained from art. He flies to the gin-shop as his only resource; and when,
reduced to a worse level than the lowest brute in the scale of creation,
he lies wallowing in the kennel, your saintly lawgivers lift up their
hands to heaven, and exclaim for a law which shall convert the day
intended for rest and cheerfulness, into one of universal gloom, bigotry,
and persecution.



CHAPTER II
--AS SABBATH BILLS WOULD MAKE IT

The provisions of the bill introduced into the House of Commons by
Sir Andrew Agnew, and thrown out by that House on the motion for
the second reading, on the 18th of May in the present year, by a

majority of 32, may very fairly be taken as a test of the length to which
the fanatics, of which the honourable Baronet is the distinguished
leader, are prepared to go. No test can be fairer; because while on the
one hand this measure may be supposed to exhibit all that improvement
which mature reflection and long deliberation may have suggested, so
on the other it may very reasonably be inferred, that if it be quite as
severe in its provisions, and to the full as partial in its operation, as
those which have preceded it and experienced a similar fate, the disease
under which the honourable Baronet and his friends labour, is perfectly
hopeless, and beyond the reach of cure.
The proposed enactments of the bill are briefly these:- All work is
prohibited on the Lord's day, under heavy penalties, increasing with
every repetition of the offence. There are penalties for keeping shops
open--penalties for drunkenness--penalties for keeping open houses of
entertainment--penalties for being present at any public meeting or
assembly--penalties for letting carriages, and penalties for hiring
them--penalties for travelling in steam- boats, and penalties for taking
passengers--penalties on vessels commencing their voyage on
Sunday--penalties on the owners of cattle who suffer them to be driven
on the Lord's day--penalties on constables who refuse to act, and
penalties for resisting them when they do. In addition to these trifles,
the constables are invested with arbitrary, vexatious, and most
extensive powers; and all this in a bill which sets out with a
hypocritical and canting declaration that 'nothing is more