THE SABBATICAL DAY. F EW changes of social opinion have been
more remarkable or more sudden than that which now promises to make the adoption of a weekly day of rest universal throughout Europe. Fifty years ago—or, indeed, forty—when the Sunday tyranny, just then declining from its worst height, still lay heavy upon the land, when among the respectable classes of society it was held almost wicked to take a walk on Sunday, and quite wicked to read a newspaper, and when growing boys and girls were driven into raging ill-temper and hysteria by the compulsory quietude of sixteen hours, cynical observers, fretted to death by the inaction demanded of them by the clergy and pions women, used to predict that the observance of Sunday would one day die away altogether, that a super- stition so grovelling could not last, and that Sunday laws, like sumptuary laws, would expire, unrepealed, of a silent change in the general brain. The writer himself, bred under the strictest code upon the subject, can well remember the abhorrence with which the day was regarded by a majority of the young, and the spiteful pleasure with which they observed that the lower you went in society, the less was the reverence felt for the Sabbatical laws. The democracy, he would have pre- dicted, being an observant but not far-sighted lad, the moment they arrived at power, would "sweep away this relic of a re- stricted theory of life," and by leaving the observance of the day to the individual conscience, would either inflict a sharp fine upon the narrow-minded remnant of the faithful, or "restore to the workers the seventh of their time of which they had been deprived by an unjust and senseless legislation." The bitter- ness of feeling for and against the day was, in many strata of English society, almost incredible, and deprived its victims of all power of impartial reasoning—those who defended its observance talking nonsense about its having been the first moral law ordained after the creation of man ; while those who disliked it, but who for the most part were condemned to silence, were utterly blind to the value of an opinion which, had it been universal, would have secured to mankind at least one rapidly recurring interval of rest. To this horn' the writer meets men, generally excellent citizens and church-goers, who can hardly persuade themselves, long as the tyranny has passed by, that it, is not a duty to protest against it by doing something unusual on Sunday, and notices in them as a dis- tinct mental note, that a prosecution for working on Sunday makes them slightly savage, as a distraint for Church-rates used to make the sturdier Nonconformists. These men would all have said when they were young, that the "march of opinion" could not be in favour of the Levitical law, and when they were middle-aged, that "Sunday ways" were, ex- cept as regarded church-going, distinctly dying away. They are getting old now, and, behold, all Europe with one consent is adopting the "oppressive law," and they themselves approve it as a great sign of the advance of opinion in a generous and philanthropic direction. This very week, a law prohibiting work on Sunday is passing with little opposition through
the Legislatures of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Italy, and thete is every probability that it will be adopted in France ; while all thinkers who are on the popular side or the philan- thropic side, and who are exempt from anti-religious bitterness, decidedly approve.
The change of opinion is a singular one, yet not so singular as the fact that there should ever have been a conflict about the matter, or that the weekly suspension of labour should still be so strictly limited to those who, in one form or another, profess the Christian or Jewish creeds. Men are not naturally fond of labour, and one would have thought that when they settled down to the industrial life, and practically agreed that work, whether in itself a curse or a blessing, should be regarded as a primary duty, they would have insisted upon stated and speedily recurring periods of rest. Long holidays, when food has to be earned, are much too inconvenient ; short general suspensions of labour are much less embarrassing than partial ones, during which each class, by intermitting work at its own pleasure, incom- modes the others; and the week, the fourth part of the moon's rotation, is a natural division of time. One would have said that a holiday every seventh day would have struck men everywhere as expedient, and more especially all Asiatics, who never deny, even if they are Chinese, that meditation is one of the duties as well as the privileges of man. Asiatics, at all events, are not bemused with the notion that in- dustry is a virtue, irrespective of its motive ; they, at all events, do not question that life has higher objects than living ; and they, at all events, have shown their ability to convert any customs they think expedient into immutable laws. They too set the first example, though on the minutest • scale, for the Sabbatical day began as an Asiatic and not as a European institution. One would have fancied, too, that philanthropic legislators as they arose, whether sages like Munoo or Ga,utama or Confucius, or kindly Sovereigns like the Antonines, or defenders of the poor like many of the Roman agitators and Middle Age leaders of revolt, would have insisted, in the interests of humanity, that labour should periodically pause, that the toilers should have time to draw breath, that life should not, by a never- ending pursuit of gain, or even of food, be hopelessly materialised. It was not so, however. So far as we know, the little Syrian clan which held through ages so lofty a creed, yet never could be kept to it for a generation without such special promises and threats, stood alone in the ancient world in insisting that labour should stop on every seventh day. The ancients had plenty of holidays, but they never made them weekly, and never extended them so as to cover the entire community. In all Asia, there never has been, so far as we know, and there is not now, any frequently recurring day of rest, the Chinese, in particular, who are a third of humanity, working on from year to year, generation to generation, and century to century, without ever insisting on a pause. Indeed, we may say there never was any pause in Europe, for outside England, and excepting fitful periods in limited localities, work went on on all days more or less, the recognition of Sunday being rather a custom highly approved by the Churches than one universally adopted. The neces- sity of a general weekly holiday seems never to have been felt, much less to have been recognised by law, or by one of those customs based on an instinctive sense of convenience which are so much stronger than all laws. The fact, as we have said, is an exceedingly curious one, much more curious than the present tendency to make Sunday a peremptorily close day. It is possible that the dominion of soldiers had something to do with the matter, soldiers' habits becoming fixed in war-time, and war recognising no holidays ; and possible too that, the one universal work being agriculture, the ideas of peasants greatly influenced their rulers. With all cultivators, work, being regulated by the seasons, is necessarily fierce or intermittent in patches, and the instinctive desire is for long holidays in slack times, as, for example, just before harvest, rather than for recurrent intervals of leisure. Even now, and in England, the opinion of labourers excuses haymaking on Sunday, and if the majority owned the soil, we should see plenty of Sunday labour in the fields. The great cause of the avoidance of regular holidays was, however, we are nearly convinced, slave-labour, and the traditionary habits of thought and action which slave-labour encouraged. The whole body of the free were determined
that slaves should work without pause—that is the only possible explanation of the security ancient society felt against slave risings—and would tolerate no plan of life and no social custom which seriously interfered with that.
Will the present movement in favour of Sunday as a day of rest be merely spasmodic, or is it likely to last ? We think it likely to last. It has in its favour the approval of all the Churches, which, though often careless about the matter for long periods of time, have never ceased to urge the beneficial effect of obeying the Christian tradition, and in their own lowest as well as highest interests, can never cease to urge it. No priesthood can possibly wish either that the external ordinances of their faith should be neglected, or that men's minds should be materialised until they become as indifferent as the brutes. The philanthropic men of science, too, who will have much more to say in the world than they have had, will all be on the same side, some wishing to improve hygiene, which requires periods of rest for hard workers, and some to win from toil a time for mental growth and cultivation which shall not be rendered worthless by physical fatigue. And, finally, the masses, who are obtainingthe vote, are becoming conscious of their own interest, and that even in places where there exists a positive spite against religion,—a very curious state of mind, which has made its appearance at intervals all through Euro- pean history, mixing itself up, for instance, with the revolt of the Albigenses, with the whole history of witchcraft, with the Huguenot movement, and even with our own " Lollardry," and which has not been half so carefully studied as it should be. The hand-workers of Europe will not give up the Sunday any more when once they have fairly got it, nor suffer the laws to be repealed without which the suspension of toil cannot be made sufficiently universal. Rather they will make the weekly rest, if anything, a little too long. The movement for doubling it has begun already, and in England has assumed marked propor- tions, especially as regards child-labour. The people have con- tracted a habit of counting. not the days of toil in a week, but the hours, and of striking off every fresh hour they gain from the Saturday's stint. As they learn to use leisure better, they will become more impatient of getting their leisure in little fractions, and will incline, as they do already, towards claiming entire days in which they will be masters of their own time. The idea will strike many employers as extrava- gant, but it is one which this writer at least very strongly holds, that before another generation has risen to the control of affairs, the workmen of Europe, aided it may be by a new motive-force less cumbrous and more manageable than steam, will have turned their present ideal, the eight-hours day, into a nine-hours day lasting from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and will have secured in every week two Sabbatical days, the Saturday and Sunday. That seems a large deduction from labour, but science is adding to men's force ; the Saturday is already but a broken day, and the diminution of drinking as the most wasteful of all habits, will restore to nearly half the families in the Kingdom at least three hours a week of extra capacity for work. There will be no real loss of time, as the easy adoption of the half-holiday abundantly proves, while the toilers of the world will gain at last that command of leisure without which, as the great Hebrew-Egyptian would seem to have foreseen, there can be no full opportunity either of mental or spiritual advance. People nowadays will have it that Moses was not " inspired " in any sense ; but where did he get that notion of giving up a seventh of a nation's time for labour, in order to secure to it a time for worship and thought Was it generated in his mind solely by pity for the over-work of his people, when on an earth which is like iron and under a sky that seems of brass, they heaped up the massive brickwork which has survived Pharaoh, but has not survived the slaves to whom he would give no rest
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