Baltimore Evening Sun (1 June 1911): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

Look out for automobiles! Boil your drinking water! Watch the City Council!

Down at Back river, on Sabbath evenings, the bar is wide open, but the dancing pavilion is dark. In brief, liquor selling on Sunday, which is specifically forbidden by law, is permitted by the county police, but dancing on Sunday, which is only indirectly forbidden, is prohibited. A quaint and humorous code of morals!

But halt! Standing upon the bluff at Hollywood, one sees to the westward the ghostly lights of Baltimore town, and there, too, a quaint and humorous code of morals is enforced by the police. In Baltimore the man who would presume, on a Sunday, to give a public performance of “Hamlet” or “Das Rheingold” or the Fifth Symphony would be dragged to jail as a common rogue—and yet the 200 disorderly houses of the town are open 168 hours a week, and it is precisely on Sunday evening, next to Saturday evening, that they enjoy their greatest prosperity.

Here is a point that the professional virtuosi of virtue apparently overlook. Their frenzy is for the appearance: they let the substance go. In laying the ghost of evil they foster evil itself. Against Sunday baseball they set their faces—and yet it must be plain to any sane man that Sunday baseball would keep thousands away from the second-rate suburban resorts, where no man may take his ease unless he pays a heavy rent to the bar. Against Sunday dancing they howl in horror—and yet it must be plain that the young man who takes his girl to a dance on Sunday night, even if it be above a livery stable, is measurably better off than the young man who is driven, by sheer ennui, to seek Sabbath divertisement in the tenderloin.

Attacked by reason, the professional moralists almost always seek safety behind the breastworks of piety. That is to say, they maintain that Sunday was ordained for churchgoing and that laws permitting merrymaking on the day would empty the churches. To this, of course, many obvious answers are possible. In the first place, it is ridiculous to maintain that that purely theoretical man who to driven to church in desperation, simply because no other and more attractive diversion offers, is appreciably benefited by his attendance. And in the second place, it must be admitted, even by the most earnest, that the whole of Sunday cannot be spent in church. The morning service consumes, let us say, two hours and the evening service an hour. That makes three hours. But the average man is awake 16 hours out of the 24. What is he to do during the remaining 13?

As a matter of fact, it is highly probable that a more civilized Sunday would encourage rather than discourage churchgoing. Our present barbarous laws, by prohibiting all rational amusements within the city limits, drive thousands out of town on every fair Sunday in summer. I should say that fully 10,000 Baltimoreans go to the fishing shores along the Patapsco and its branches every Sunday from May to October, and that 15,000 more spend the day at the suburban parks or in playing baseball or watching baseball games elsewhere over the border.

These folk make a day of it. They go out early in the in morning and they remain until dark or later. Here are 25,000 potential churchgoers driven out of town every Sunday. Many of them, I admit, are not of the stuff of which churchmen are made—but if they were within reach it might be possible, nevertheless, to attract them. As it is, they are lost entirely.

The truth is that the argument that a reasonable and humane relaxation of the blue laws would ruin the churches is not supported by the probabilities. I speak, of course, of a reasonable relaxation, and not of a total wiping-out. It is undeniable that if a burlesque theatre were opened next door to each church in the city, and both were wide open all day Sunday, the burlesque theatre would do much harm to the church and to decency. But nobody advocates any such absurdity. All that the most impatient reformer asks to that the people, when they are not at church, be permitted to amuse themselves decently and in order and without breaking any law.

In Germany and France the theatres and summer gardens are open on Sunday—but not during church hours. That arrangement seems to work admirably. The people go to church in the morning and amuse themselves in the afternoon. I once tried to get into a church in Munich on a Sunday morning. It was the hour of high mass and the church was crowded to the doors. That afternoon I tried to get into a hall wherein a big Munich orchestra, led by some great conductor from Vienna, was giving a concert. It, too, was crowded to the doors.

The real objection to reasonable Sunday laws, in truth, is not that they are inimical to religion, for they are not, but that they are distasteful to those persons who hold that Sunday should be devoted entirely to meditation and self-torture. I know men—honest, earnest estimable men—who so believe, and who exhibit their belief in their acts. But most of us, unluckily, are incapable of such sustained and arduous goodness. We insist that innocent merriment is not sinful—that a man must have some fun in his hours of ease—that it makes a better man of him—that Sunday afternoon is the best time for such relaxation—that, to thousands of hard-working men, it is the only time available.

We do not object to the asceticism of our more staid brothers, but we do say that they must not ask us to follow them when we think them wrong. Virtue, once it grows militant and tyrannical, tends to become a vice. It is perfectly possible, indeed, to go upon a debauch of goodness. The man who harasses and tortures his fellow-men in the name of morality is upon just such a debauch. It is not an excuse for him to say that no intent to do evil is in his acts, just as it is not an excuse for a drunkard to say that, when he beat his wife, his one thought was to make her respect him. The apple is the true test of the apple tree. Blue laws which send prosperity to the river resort, the disorderly house and the side-entrance saloon are certainly not laws that rise superior to all honest criticism.

The Voice of the People, as overheard on street-car platforms:

H. L. Mencken