'The Sunday Screw'

This little instrument, remarkable for its curious twist, has been at work again. A small portion of the collective wisdom of the nation has affirmed the principle that there must be no collection or delivery of posted letters on a Sunday. The principle was discussed by something less than a fourth of the House of Commons, and affirmed by something less than a seventh.

Having no doubt whatever, that this brilliant victory is, in effect, the affirmation of the principle that there ought to be No Anything but churches and chapels on a Sunday; or, that it is the beginning of a Sabbatarian Crusade, outrageous to the spirit of Christianity, irreconcileable with the health, the rational enjoyments, and the true religious feeling, of the community; and certain to result, if successful, in a violent re-action, threatening contempt and hatred of that seventh day which it is a great religious and social object to maintain in the popular affection; it would ill become us to be deterred from speaking out upon the subject, by any fear of being misunderstood, or by any certainty of being misrepresented.

Confident in the sense of the country, and not unacquainted with the habits and exigencies of the people, we approach the Sunday question, quite undiscomposed by the late storm of mad mis-statement and all uncharitableness, which cleared the way for Lord Ashley’s motion. The preparation may be likened to that which is usually described in the case of the Egyptian Sorcerer and the boy who has some dark liquid poured into the palm of his hand, which is presently to become a magic mirror. “Look for Lord Ashley. What do you see?” “Oh, here’s some one with a broom!” “Well! what is he doing?” “Oh, he’s sweeping away Mr. Rowland Hill! Now, there is a great crowd of people all sweeping Mr. Rowland Hill away; and now, there is a red flag with Intolerance on it; and now, they are pitching a great many Tents called Meetings. Now, the tents are all upset, and Mr. Rowland Hill has swept everybody else away. And oh! now, here’s Lord Ashley, with a Resolution in his hand!”

One Christian sentence is all-sufficient with us, on the theological part of this subject.

“The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.” No amount of signatures to petitions can ever sign away the meaning of those words; no end of volumes of Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates can ever affect them in the least. Move and carry resolutions, bring in bills, have committees, upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady’s chamber; read a first time, read a second time, read a third time, read thirty thousand times; the declared authority of the Christian dispensation over the letter of the Jewish Law, particularly in this especial instance, cannot be petitioned, resolved, read, or committee’d away.

It is important in such a case as this affirmation of a principle, to know what amount of practical sense and logic entered into its assertion. We will inquire.

Lord Ashley (who has done much good, and whom we mention with every sentiment of sincere respect, though we believe him to be most mischievously deluded on this question,) speaks of the people employed in the Country Post-Offices on Sunday, as though they were continually at work, all the livelong day. He asks whether they are to be “a Pariah race, excluded from the enjoyments of the rest of the community?” He presents to our mind’s eye, rows of Post-Office clerks, sitting, with dishevelled hair and dirty linen, behind small shutters, all Sunday long, keeping time with their sighs to the ringing of the church bells, and watering bushels of letters, incessantly passing through their hands, with their tears. Is this exactly the reality? The Upas tree is a figure of speech almost as ancient as our lachrymose friend the Pariah, in whom most of us recognise a respectable old acquaintance. Supposing we were to take it into our heads to declare in these Household Words, that every Post-Office clerk employed on Sunday in the country, is compelled to sit under his own particular sprig of Upas, planted in a flower-pot beside him for the express purpose of blighting him with its baneful shade, should we be much more beyond the mark than Lord Ashley himself? Did any of our readers ever happen to post letters in the Country on a Sunday? Did they ever see a notice outside a provincial Post-Office, to the effect that the presiding Pariah would be in attendance at such an hour on Sunday, and not before? Did they ever wait for the Pariah, at some inconvenience, until the hour arrived, and observe him come to the office in an extremely spruce condition as to his shirt collar, and do a little sprinkling of business in a very easy offhand manner? We have such recollections ourselves. We have posted and received letters in most parts of this kingdom on a Sunday, and we never yet observed the Pariah to be quite crushed. On the contrary, we have seen him at church, apparently in the best health and spirits (notwithstanding an hour or so of sorting, earlier in the morning), and we have met him out a-walking with the young lady to whom he is engaged, and we have known him meet her again with her cousin, after the dispatch of the Mails, and really conduct himself as if he were not particularly exhausted or afflicted. Indeed, how could he be so, on Lord Ashley’s own showing? There is a Saturday before the Sunday. We are a people indisposed, he says, to business on a Sunday. More than a million of people are known, from their petitions, to be too scrupulous to hear of such a thing. Few counting-houses or offices are ever opened on a Sunday. The Merchants and Bankers write by Saturday night’s post. The Sunday night’s post may be presumed to be chiefly limited to letters of necessity and emergency. Lord Ashley’s whole case would break down, if it were probable that the Post-Office Pariah had half as much confinement on Sunday, as the He-Pariah who opens my Lord’s street-door when any body knocks, or the ShePariah who nurses my Lady’s baby.

If the London Post-Office be not opened on a Sunday, says Lord Ashley, why should the Post-Offices of provincial towns be opened on a Sunday? Precisely because the provincial towns are NOT London, we apprehend. Because London is the great capital, mart, and business-centre of the world; because in London there are hundreds of thousands of people, young and old, away from their families and friends; because the stoppage of the Monday’s Post Delivery in London would stop, for many precious hours, the natural flow of the blood from every vein and artery in the world to the heart of the world, and its return from the heart through all those tributary channels. Because the broad difference between London and every other place in England, necessitated this distinction, and has perpetuated it.

But, to say nothing of petitioners elsewhere, it seems that two hundred merchants and bankers in Liverpool “formed themselves into a committee, to forward the object of this motion.” In the name of all the Pharisees of Jerusalem, could not the two hundred merchants and bankers form themselves into a committee to write or read no business-letters themselves on a Sunday – and let the Post-Office alone? The Government establishes a monopoly in the Post-Office, and makes it not only difficult and expensive for me to send a letter by any other means, but illegal. What right has any merchant or banker to stop the course of any letter that I may have sore necessity to post, or may choose to post? If any one of the two hundred merchants and bankers lay at the point of death, on Sunday, would he desire his absent child to be written to – the Sunday Post being yet in existence? And how do they take upon themselves to tell us that the Sunday Post is not a “necessity,” when they know, every man of them, every Sunday morning, that before the clock strikes next, they and theirs may be visited by any one of incalculable millions of accidents, to make it a dire need ? Not a necessity? Is it possible that these merchants and bankers suppose there is any Sunday Post, from any large town, which is not a very agony of necessity to some one? I might as well say, in my pride of strength, that a knowledge of bone-setting in surgeons is not a necessity, because I have not broken my leg.

There is a Sage of this sort in the House of Commons. He is of opinion that the Sunday Police is a necessity, but the Sunday Post is not. That is to say, in a certain house in London or Westminster, there are certain silver spoons, engraved with the family crest – a Bigot rampant – which would be pretty sure to disappear, on an early Sunday, if there were no Policemen on  duty; whereas the Sage sees no present probability of his requiring to write a letter into the country on a Saturday night – and, if it should arise, he can use the Electric Telegraph. Such is the sordid balance some professing Heathens hold of their own pounds against other men’s pennies, and their own selfish wants against those of the community at large! Even the Member for Birmingham, of all the towns in England, is afflicted by this selfish blindness, and, because he is “tired of reading and answering letters on a Sunday,” cannot conceive the possibility of there being other people not so situated, to whom the Sunday Post may, under many circumstances, be an unspeakable blessing.

The inconsequential nature of Lord Ashley's positions, cannot be better shown, than by one brief passage from his speech. “When he said the transmission of the Mail, he meant the Mailbags; he did not propose to interfere with the passengers.” No? Think again, Lord Ashley. When the Honorable Member for Whitened Sepulchres moves his resolution for the stoppage of Mail Trains – in a word, of all Rail-way travelling – on Sunday; and when that Honorable Gentleman talks about the Pariah clerks who take the money and give the tickets, the Pariah engine-drivers, the Pariah stokers, the Pariah porters, the Pariah police along the line, and the Pariah flys waiting at the Pariah stations to take the Pariah passengers, to be attended by Pariah servants at the Pariah Arms and other Pariah Hotels; what will Lord Ashley do then? Envy insinuated that Tom Thumb made his giants first, and then killed them, but you cannot do the like by your Pariahs. You cannot get an exclusive patent for the manufacture and destruction of Pariah dolls. Other Honorable Gentlemen are certain to engage in the trade; and when the Honorable Member for Whitened Sepulchres makes his Pariahs of all these people, you cannot refuse to recognise them as being of the genuine sort, Lord Ashley. Railway and all other Sunday Travelling, suppressed, by the Honorable Member for Whitened Sepulchres, the same honorable gentleman, who will not have been particularly complimented in the course of that achievement by the Times Newspaper, will discover that a good deal is done towards the Times of Monday, on a Sunday night, and will Pariah the whole of that immense establishment. For, this is the great inconvenience of Pariah-making, that when you begin, they spring up like mushrooms: insomuch, that it is very doubtful whether we shall have a house in all this land, from the Queen’s Palace downward, which will not be found, on inspection, to be swarming with Pariahs. Not touch the Mails, and yet abolish the Mail-bags? Stop all those silent messengers of a affection and anxiety, yet let the talking traveller, who is the cause of infinitely more employment, go? Why, this were to suppose all men Fools, and the Honorable Member for Whitened Sepulchres even a greater Noodle than he is!

Lord Ashley supports his motion by reading some perilous bombast, said to be written by a working man – of whom the intelligent body of working men have no great reason, to our thinking, to be proud – in which there is much about not being robbed of the boon of the day of rest; but, with all Lord Ashley's indisputably humane and benevolent impulses, we grieve to say we know no robber whom the working man, really desirous to preserve his Sunday, has so much to dread, as Lord Ashley himself. He is weakly lending the influence of his good intentions to a movement which would make that day no day of rest – rest to those who are overwrought, includes recreation, fresh air, change but a day of mortification and gloom. And this not to one class only, be it understood. This is not a class question. If there be no gentleman of spirit in the House of Commons to remind Lord Ashley that the high-flown nonsense he quoted, concerning labour, is but another form of the stupidest socialist dogma, which seeks to represent that there is only one class of laborers on earth, it is well that the truth should be stated somewhere. And it is, indisputably, that three-fourths of us are laborers who work hard for our living; and that the condition of what we call the working-man, has its parallel, at a remove of certain degrees, in almost all professions and pursuits. Running through the middle classes, is a broad deep vein of constant, compulsory, indispensable work. There are innumerable gentlemen, and sons and daughters of gentlemen, constantly at work, who have no more hope of making fortunes in their vocation, than the working man has in his. There are innumerable families in which the day of rest, is the only day out of the seven, where innocent domestic recreations and enjoyments are very feasible. In our mean gentility, which is the cause of so much social mischief, we may try to separate ourselves, as to this question, from the working-man; and may very complacently resolve that there is no occasion for his excursion-trains and tea-gardens, because we don’t use them; but we had better not deceive ourselves. It is impossible that we can cramp his means of needful recreation and refreshment, without cramping our own, or basely cheating him. We cannot leave him to the Christian patronage of the Honourable Member for Whitened Sepulchres, and take ourselves off. We cannot restrain him and leave ourselves free. Our Sunday wants are pretty much the same as his, though his are far more easily satisfied; our inclinations and our feelings are pretty much the same; and it will be no less wise than honest in us, the middle classes, not to be Janus-faced about the matter.

What is it that the Honorable Member for Whitened Sepulchres, for whom Lord Ashley clears the way, wants to do? He sees on a Sunday morning, in the large towns of England, when the bells are ringing for church and chapel, certain unwashed, dim-eyed, dissipated loungers, hanging about the doors of public-houses, and loitering at the street corners, to whom the day of rest appeals in much the same degree as a sunny summer-day does to so many pigs. Does he believe that any weight of handcuffs on the Post-Office, or any amount of restriction imposed on decent people, will bring Sunday home to these? Let him go, any Sunday morning, from the new Town of Edinburgh where the sound of a piano would be profanation, to the old Town, and see what Sunday is in the Canongate. Or let him get up some statistics of the drunken people in Glasgow, while the churches are full – and work out the amount of Sabbath observance which is carried downward, by rigid shows and sad-colored forms.

But, there is another class of people, those who take little jaunts, and mingle in social little assemblages, on a Sunday, concerning whom the whole constituency of Whitened Sepulchres, with their Honorable Member in the chair, find their lank hair standing on end with horror, and pointing, as if they were all electrified, straight up to the skylights of Exeter Hall. In reference to this class, we would whisper in the ears of the disturbed assemblage, three short words, “Let well alone!”

The English people have long been remarkable for their domestic habits, and their household virtues and affections. They are, now, beginning to be universally respected by intelligent foreigners who visit this country, for their unobtrusive politeness, their good-humour, and their cheerful recognition of all restraints that really originate in consideration for the general good. They deserve this testimony (which we have often heard, of late, with pride) most honorably. Long maligned and mistrusted, they proved their case from the very first moment of having it in their power to do so; and have never, on any single occasion within our knowledge, abused any public confidence that has been reposed in them. It is an extraordinary thing to know of a people, systematically excluded from galleries and museums for years, that their respect for such places, and for themselves as visitors to them, dates, without any period of transition, from the very day when their doors were freely opened. The national vices are surprisingly few. The people in general are not gluttons, nor drunkards, nor gamblers, nor addicted to cruel sports, nor to the pushing of any amusement to furious and wild extremes. They are moderate, and easily pleased, and very sensible to all affectionate influences. Any knot of holiday-makers, without a large proportion of women and children among them, would be a perfect phenomenon. Let us go into any place of Sunday enjoyment where any fair representation of the people resort, and we shall find them decent, orderly, quiet, sociable among their families and neighbours. There is a general feeling of respect for religion, and for religious observances. The churches and chapels are well filled. Very few people who keep servants or apprentices, leave out of consideration their opportunities of attending church or chapel; the general demeanour within those edifices, is particularly grave and decorous; and the general recreations without, are of a harmless and simple kind. Lord Brougham never did Henry Brougham more justice, than in declaring to the House of Lords, after the success of this motion in the House of Commons, that there is no country where the Sabbath is, on the whole, better observed than in England. Let the constituency of Whitened Sepulchres ponder, in a Christian spirit, on these things; take care of their own consciences; leave their Honorable Member to take care of his; and let well alone.

For, it is in nations as in families. Too tight a hand in these respects, is certain to engender a disposition to break loose, and to run riot. If the private experience of any reader, pausing on this sentence, cannot furnish many unhappy illustrations of its truth, it is a very fortunate experience indeed. Our most notable public example of it, in England, is just two hundred years old.

Lord Ashley had better merge his Pariahs into the body politic; and the Honorable Member for Whitened Sepulchres had better accustom his jaundiced eyes to the Sunday sight of dwellers in towns, roaming in green fields, and gazing upon country prospects. If he will look a little beyond them, and lift up the eyes of his mind, perhaps he may observe a mild, majestic figure in the distance, going through a field of corn, attended by some common men who pluck the grain as they pass along, and whom their Divine Master teaches that he is the Lord, even of the Sabbath-Day.