Part 3

_Clerk_. I was brought up in a Sunday School, my parents are members of a Christian Church, and I always attended myself until I was occupied on the railway.

_Myself_. What wages do you obtain?

_Clerk_. I am paid eighteen shillings a week.

Here, my Lord, are some facts worthy of your consideration. You have heard a great deal about Millocracy and the cruelties practised in the manufacturing districts. I live among factories and we have “_A Ten Hours Bill_,” and our operatives leave work at four, some at two, o’clock on Saturday, and have the whole Sabbath to themselves. The wages on an average are quite equal to those of this railway clerk. And yet we are told that these masters are tyrants, oppressors, and care nothing for their workpeople. But if so, what shall we say of the “_Railocracy_” which is springing up among us? The poor railway operative in a great number of cases has no Saturday afternoon to himself, no Good Friday, no Christmas-day, no Sunday, no holiday throughout the year. He must never attend a place of worship, and in some instances he is prohibited from reading during the hours that he is on the line. Such a monotonous life, though spent on Parnassus, or in the pleasant vale of Tempe, would prove fatal to all physical, intellectual, and moral health. And when we consider that some of the buildings and localities in which these poor fellows are imprisoned are almost as comfortless as an Irish cabin, and far worse than many gaols, we must blush for the system which thus violates all the dictates of humanity and religion. We spend some thousands a year to send missionaries to the heathen, to teach barbarians to keep the Sabbath, but how little do those simple hearted savages dream that, at home, we doom our own Christian brethren to break the Sabbath and become pagans in a land of Bibles and Gospel light, or that we have Lords who wish for royal charters to sanction this cruelty and wickedness!

At the time that our peeresses and other ladies are bestirring themselves to move the heart of woman in America to feel for her coloured brethren and sisters in bondage, we, who boast of being quite free from all the prejudices of colour, wish to doom our own fellow countrymen to the slavery of the rail and Crystal Palace, and then “thank God that we are not as other men are,” nor even as those vile Americans!! Is it any wonder that Brother Jonathan laughs at our philanthropy, or tauntingly retorts, “Physician, heal thyself!” The most complete specimen of religious grimace and morbid sentimentalism is to see an Englishman or Englishwoman alternately shedding tears, or burning with indignation over the fetters of a negro on the other side of the Atlantic, and yet, at the same moment, condemning his own free born brethren and fellow citizens to the murderous slavery of the rail, because it will add to the pelf of some and minister to the pleasure of others! Talk, indeed, of Judas being dead; why, Mr. Mayhew, kissing the mob in order that he may induce them first to doom their brethren and then themselves to all the fatal consequences of Sabbath labour and Sabbath dissipation, is a sufficient proof that the spirit of the arch traitor is still living among us!

We have of late been very fond of commissions and commissioners. It has been quite a money speculation. We first create an evil and then employ men to inquire into the extent of the mischief. We have sent into the factories, the mines, and the agricultural districts, and children have been expected to answer questions in religion which would have puzzled not a few of our Lords temporal and spiritual; but let our present Sabbath railway system continue, let the Sydenham grounds be open, and other modes of Sabbath slavery be adopted, and we shall soon want a Committee of the House of Commons, and a host of commissioners to inquire into the disease, insanity, crime, ignorance, premature deaths, and frequent accidents connected with railways. It is well known that the late catastrophe on the North-Western line near Oxford, by which six lives were sacrificed, was mainly owing to the immoral character of the driver. This man, with several other drivers and firemen, was drinking and carousing the night before. His wife, the _Daily News_ tells us, had only the day preceding the fatal collision been obliged to flee and take refuge in a neighbour’s house from his violence; and when he mounted the engine, with which he hurried himself so recklessly into destruction, and involved others in his ruin, he had just come from a pothouse, and was under the maddening influence of liquor. It has been my lot, when waiting for night trains, to have to stay for a considerable time in station houses and elsewhere, and there listen to the conversation of drivers, firemen, porters, and others; and the profanity and obscenity would hardly have been surpassed by pagans. And is it any wonder, seeing Sabbath breaking, in many cases, must be an essential trait in the character of the servants of our different railway companies?

No man who reverences and worships God will break his commandments by working on the Sabbath, and therefore in a very little time no truly religious person will have anything to do with railways; and hence it will come to this, that the lives and property of millions of Her Majesty’s subjects will be entrusted to Sabbath breakers who neither “fear God nor regard man.” Formerly we were taught that Sabbath desecration led to every vice; but now, forsooth, all kinds of good are to flow from the transgression of the command of the King of Kings, and the whole community is to be placed, to a great extent, at the mercy of those who are prohibited by their masters from having any mercy on themselves.

Volumes upon volumes of facts, my Lord, might be written to show that without a Sabbath you cannot have a _healthy_ or _moral_ population. And surely I need not spend any time to prove that _health_ and _morality_ are essential to national prosperity and greatness. People destitute of health cannot be strong and enterprising; and citizens without good morals will bring themselves to ruin by their own vices. Hence the Sabbath was divinely instituted to preserve both. The rest was intended for the invigoration of the body; and the leisure for religious tuition, study, and worship was ordained for the moral edification of the soul; and therefore if you grant royal charters for Sabbath labour, you will shorten the days of the workpeople, and at the same time deprive their minds of the means of religious improvement. On God’s own day you lock up or chain the man from the sanctuary, and then on the week-day you lock the sanctuary from the man! For the sake of Mammon and the Moloch of pleasure, you slay men’s bodies and ruin their souls. Whole hecatombs of human victims are to be immolated for the purpose of increasing the dividends of railway speculators, and gratifying those who delight in Sabbath desecration and in trampling the laws of God under their feet. Wealth is of course valuable, and pleasure desirable, but no one has a right to obtain either of these blessings at the expense of his brother man. Money gained at the risk of the health or life of but a single servant or operative is the price of blood; and that cup of pleasure will end in the bitterest sorrow which was procured by violating the divine injunction, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

You are therefore, my Lord, on the plain principles of humanity, called upon to use your influence that the grounds of the Crystal Palace shall not be opened on the Sabbath. Though you rejected revelation; though you supposed the moral law abolished; though you believed that human senators are prohibited from legislating on any subject on which Jehovah has given a law; yet it would then be your duty to exert yourself to prevent Sunday trading and labour. All persons admit that life and property are proper objects for political laws. Hence you have various sanitary regulations. There are laws respecting public nuisances, drainage, and common sewers: you have statutes prohibiting the keeping of pigs and other animals in cities and towns: you have enactments concerning public houses, gin palaces, putrescent fish and vegetables: you have penalties to protect persons from dangerous footpaths, machinery, and poisonous gases; murder and theft are punishable by law; and neither parents, masters, nor mistresses are allowed to maltreat their children, servants, or dependents. If I mistake not, I was in the House of Commons, when I heard your Lordship advocate the Factory Act; and you have the Ten Hours Bill and laws respecting the labour of women and children in mines and factories: the sale of intoxicating liquors in the Crystal Palace was forbidden; and ale houses are closed until noon on the Lord’s-day; and we have reason to believe that your Lordship approves of all these enactments. And we presume that you do so because all of them, either directly or indirectly, involve the preservation of the health, lives or property of Her Majesty’s subjects. And now, my Lord, upon the very same grounds and reasons we call upon you to interfere in the case of the Sydenham Palace. We know, and you, my Lord, know full well, that higher motives might be urged; but we now pass these by, and simply plead, that the opening of the said pleasure gardens on the Lord’s-day, in consequence of the Sabbath labour that would be attended therewith, would be an infraction of the natural rights of many of your neighbours and fellow citizens, and therefore ought to be prohibited by law.

It is now demonstrated beyond all controversy that man’s body wants rest at the end of every six days. History and physiology, independent of religion, assure us of this fact. If you deny to the horse, the ox, the ass, or the man the rest of the Sabbath, you kill him before his time; and consequently on the same principle of humanity on which you passed “_The Ten Hours Bill_,” and uphold laws against murder, we call on you to defend the clerks, porters, drivers, and other servants of the Sydenham speculators from the evils of Sabbath occupation. It is said by some that we are a godless age; and by others that we are a most enlightened and religious generation; and somehow or other both these classes coalesce to crush the poor labourer and shorten his life by robbing him of his Sunday. The godless people beg us not to be so fanatical as to make any law on any subject on which Jehovah has legislated; and the enlightened and hyper-religious entreat us not to sanction any statute respecting the right of the labourer to rest from toil on the seventh day, because it is a religious question!! You may make a “_Ten Hours Bill_” because it is not mentioned in the Bible; you may even enact a law against murder and theft, although both are mentioned in the Word of God; but alas! alas! to make a law to save the poor tired, worn out, weary, oppressed operative or clerk from being injured by Sabbath labour, would be to un-Protestant yourself and prove that you do not understand religious liberty!! As if religious liberty consisted in the liberty to kill our brethren and sisters by continuous labour!! If there had been no Fourth Commandment, given by God himself, we should have heard nothing about this matter. There was no Fourth Command about the “_Ten Hours Bill_” and therefore it passed; but now our poor operatives and peasants are to be robbed of their rights and burdened with over work, because their heavenly Father has said, “Remember the rest-day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour and do all thy work; but the seventh is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt do no manner of work,” &c. Therefore, as Jehovah has said we shall do “no manner of work,” you, my Lord, propose that a royal charter shall be given to railway directors to enable them to exact labour from their servants on the “Lord’s-day.” Who can after this doubt our piety, our enlightenment, our staunch Protestantism, or our love to religious liberty?

These are some of the blessings which we are told belong to Christian freedom, and the Gospel dispensation! If our overworked mechanics, operatives, and labourers lived under the darkness and bondage of the Mosaic law, then, poor souls! they might have a good week’s wages for _six_ days’ work, and have one day in seven to rest, recruit their strength, enjoy their homes, bless their families, and improve their minds and morals; but seeing they live in an age of Gospel light, they are to be blessed with _seven_ days’ hard work, no rest from toil, no leisure day to taste the sweetness of home and train themselves and their families for this world and that to come! It will require no common sophistry to persuade the simple minds of the masses that it is an overwhelming privilege, to work _seven_ days instead of _six_, and often without any increase of wages! Many of them will wish they were Jews, and that the law of Moses was still in force, that they might rest one day in seven, and enjoy the sweets of home and the blessings of religious worship and instruction.

Then how absurd to suppose that we must not legislate concerning the Sabbath, because Jehovah has legislated on it! And yet we legislate on murder, theft, &c., although both these crimes are forbidden in the decalogue. Is this because there are no Sydenham speculators in the way of observing these commands? But if we legislate concerning the right of the labourer to rest on the Sabbath, we shall prevent certain gentlemen from robbing the poor to enrich themselves, and from shortening the lives of one body of citizens to increase the profits of another. Of course it would be vastly inconvenient to give every one license to rob, steal, and take away life; but forsooth, the case is much changed when, instead of licensing all to plunder and destroy, you make a monopoly of the business, and grant to Crystal Palace adventurers the privilege of defrauding their servants of one day in seven, of corrupting the morals of their fellow citizens, and shortening their days by oppressive toil. There is a tribunal before which Lords and Commons, employers and employed must appear, and before which a director has lately been suddenly summoned. There, my Lord, the highwayman who robbed with the pistol, and the noble or squire who more genteelly, with an Act of Parliament, or royal charter, plundered the labourer of one day in seven, will be placed in the same company and indicted for the same offence; and where also those who destroyed their brethren more speedily by prussic acid; and those who did it more slowly, but not less cruelly, by hard and continuous labour, will be ranked with Cain and his fraternity. Nor will it be any mitigation of their crime to plead that they would have granted “A SEVENTH DAY BILL” as well as “A TEN HOURS BILL,” if it had not been that the Bible forbad Sabbath labour. But as the Universal Father out of pure love to his children commanded that labour should not be exacted on the seventh day, therefore it behoved human legislators to countenance Sunday occupations, lest by following the dictates of heaven, of justice and humanity, they should violate the principles of religious liberty!!!

How many persons will be employed every Sabbath on the Sydenham Railway and in the gardens we cannot tell, nor need we trouble to inquire, because it is too much to sacrifice the liberties, rights, health and life of but ONE INDIVIDUAL. Were the French, the Russians, or the Turks wantonly to kill but _one_ Englishman, we should demand satisfaction. And shall we allow ourselves to plunder and destroy our poor brethren because we hope to enrich a few speculators thereby? Granted that the pleasure of a thousand, or of a hundred thousand may be obtained by such cruelty, yet the amusement and recreation of millions is but as the small dust of the balance when weighed against the rights and the life of but ONE labourer or operative. But, my Lord, the mischief will not be confined to _one_, or _two_. We are told that the working of the Sunday train from Edinburgh to Glasgow compels at least one hundred persons to break the Sabbath. Probably quite as many will be required for the Sydenham business; and therefore the sacrifice of human comfort, rights, health and life will be very great.

And it must be remembered that but few of the men and women employed will have time to enter a place of worship on the former part of the Lord’s-day. Granted that the visitors to the grounds may very devoutly go to church and pay their devotions to the Eternal before they hasten to break his Sabbath!! yet firemen, porters, waiters, &c., will hardly have time to repair to the sanctuary before they put the engines, &c., in readiness for their masters’ customers; so that the majority of these railway servants will be deprived of the opportunity of worshipping God and learning their duty. Here then, my Lord, will be robbery and cruelty of the worst kind, and therefore we call on you as a man to interfere between the oppressor and the oppressed. If you never went to church, and prayed that God would have mercy upon you and “incline your heart to keep the Fourth Commandment”; if you disbelieved revelation altogether; if you were a Jew, Turk, infidel, or the most ultra dissenter, yet then we would appeal to your humanity and entreat you to interpose the shield of the law and protect the servants of the Sydenham directors, and indeed all labourers, from being robbed and destroyed by Sabbath occupations.

The question then, my Lord, is a _physical_ one, and just as much within the range of parliamentary prohibition as any other which involves the property and lives of Her Majesty’s subjects. There is not a law in the statute book more just or humane than the enactments against Sabbath labour. The poor man has as equitable a claim to rest for twenty-four hours, every seventh day, as he has to sleep, to food, or protection from the thief and the assassin. Sunday is his own property, and no other day can now be substituted in its place. His physical frame demands it, and must be injured if deprived of its refreshing repose; and his family and home must be rendered desolate if robbed of the presence and smile of its husband, father, instructor and companion. We pity the orphan and the widow, but Sunday labour deprives the mother and her children of their best friend for months and years in succession. It is true he may come home every night, but then it is generally when his little ones are in bed, and he leaves in the morning before they are up; and should he visit his house during the day, in many cases they are at work, or at school. You cannot, my Lord, give another day that will be a compensation for the loss of the Sunday. Should our railway directors resolve to grant their servants a day every week as a substitute for the Sabbath, still the exchange would not be an equivalent. On the Sunday the whole family rests from labour; all the members are at home; the house is nicely cleaned; wife and children are dressed in their best, and all their resources of domestic happiness are at hand. These blessings cannot be had on the Monday, Tuesday, or any other day of the week. On the Sabbath the labourer is as free from toil and care as the nobleman, the prince, or the monarch; and this weekly leisure and independence are enjoyed by all his family. The whole community also has an opportunity of participating in these comforts, so that the people sympathize with each other in their rest from work, and the endearments of home which are thus elicited and cherished. Very great also are the intellectual, moral, and religious privileges of the Sabbath. But these physical, social and spiritual advantages and pleasures cannot be shared on any other day. All sorts of occupations will call the various members of the family from home; instead of the neat and quiet Sabbath appearance of the house, wife, children, neighbours and friends, all will be bustle and confusion, and everything will wear the aspect of business, labour and toil. No one will sympathize with the week-day rest of the railway operative. His wife is in her every day garb, and perhaps obliged to leave home to follow her calling. Did he rest on the ordinary Sabbath, he would enjoy it along with others; but by the unjust arrangement which makes his Sunday a week-day, and his week-day a Sunday, he has to work when others are free from toil; and when he has a period of repose, others are at work; and the noise and labour with which he is surrounded prevent him from having that rest and social enjoyment which he might share with his friends and relatives on the general Sabbath. And then most of the sanctuaries are closed, and thus he is as much shut up from the means of salvation as if he were transported to some heathen land.

You are therefore, my Lord, about to inflict incalculable evils and injuries upon a large portion of the most valuable of your fellow citizens. The working classes are very important members of the commonwealth. We cannot all be kings and queens; and trade, commerce, agriculture, manufactures, railways and domestic life, would be in a very pitiable condition if all were lords, squires, great capitalists, and Crystal Palace speculators. Our clerks, operatives, peasants, hard handed fustain jackets, smock frocks, &c., make the wealth and the comforts of the nation.

“Princes and peers may flourish or may fade— A breath can make them, as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, If once destroyed, can never be supplied.”

Thanks to our Sabbaths, Sabbath Schools, Bibles, and Gospel Ministry, we have in this favoured land of ours, the most industrious, upright, contented, and moral population under heaven. It may suit speculators in State Education to malign the working classes, and to exaggerate the ignorance and vice that may exist among us, but still after making every just allowance for our intellectual and moral defects, we are prepared to prove, that there is no country on the globe which can boast of a race of operatives and peasants equal to the English. And are these the men and women who are to be robbed of their Sabbaths and the comforts of home? Is this the return which lords and gentlemen are about to make for their large revenues and peaceful mansions? It is no use, my Lord, to say that you only propose to injure, corrupt, and destroy a few, for the benefit of the many, because the country may have all necessary amusement without Sabbath desecration and without inflicting an evil on anyone; but if it could not, you have no right to rob even ONE man of his day of rest, his health and his home, to increase the wealth or minister to the recreation of others; and therefore, instead of sanctioning this injustice, it is the solemn duty of the Government to enact such laws as shall secure to the labourer full exemption from toil on every seventh day. Works of absolute necessity and deeds of charity and mercy may be attended to. All _requisite_ domestic duties may be performed: the sick and the young may be nursed: the ox and the ass may be led away to watering: or if either fall into a pit, it may be helped out; but then these occupations and occurrences will interfere very little with the rest of the Sabbath, and therefore can bear no comparison with continuous employment on that sacred day during the whole year.