They are as determined to secure compulsory Sabbath Day observance laws as they are to obtain Prohibition laws; and wherever and whenever you find a movement for one, you invariably find, sooner or later, a demand for the other. Prohibition and Sunday laws go hand in hand. In fact, they result from the same cause—the desire to control individuals; the application in civil law of the fallacious theory that it is “the social right of every individual that every other individual shall act in every respect exactly as he ought to act.” Nothing is further from the truth of the principle of free and popular government, and nothing so destructive of the rights and privileges of man.

Sunday laws can find no justification except in a church-and-state system of government which essays to establish a practice grounded in religious belief; to fix upon a particular rest-day, and say to individuals how they shall observe that day. A compulsory law for Sunday or Sabbath observance is equivalent to a law for compulsory baptism, or compulsory church service, or the support of the church: in like manner, sumptuary laws that determine what one may not drink, may extend to defining what one may eat, ad infinitum, until a thousand and one articles of food and drink are “unlawful”—articles of diet and consumption that to a large proportion of the citizens may seem harmless, if not, indeed, beneficial. The Sabbath law says to you what you must religiously do; and if it may extend to the observance of a day, it may extend to all religious duties and practices without exception: the Prohibition law tells you what you may not drink, and if it presumes the right to prescribe in the matter of drink, it may extend to the matter of determining what is fit, and what is not fit, to eat—and it could continue until a Dietary List and a Fashion Plate had been fixed by legal enactment. It is not difficult to see that the Sunday law and Prohibition are quite identical in character; the source of their origin must be the same: at least, it is plain that their introduction and operation in civil government is destructive of personal freedom and choice.