How Sunday is Spent.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 229, 1 December 1888, Page 2

How Sunday is Spent.

Thebe has been much discussion m Auckland on the question of the Sabbath Day, which some maintain should be kept much more holy than it is at present, whilst others urge that we should go in more for the Continental method of spending our Sunday. The Herald takes the subject up very strongly, on secular grounds, “It is perfectly true, ”

it says “ that it is a pretty and cheerful sight to see lads and lasses keeping holiday of a Sunday, and that they treasure the name of Sunday as a delight. And if the results of the Continental Sunday ended there the evil would not be so very clamant. But play must yield to the exigencies of daily toil; and the lads and lasses, so blithe in keeping the Sunday. holiday, develop into the toiling men and women seen working with the hoe and mattock when necessity requires. This is where the evil comes in. People keep holiday and play while they can, but there is no cordon of protection around the Sunday, and nothing to prevent the inroad of exacting toil ; and it is on these grounds that we have called on onr toiling classes to guard the Sabbath as their own and their dearest interest. And this is the reason, no doubt, that at the present time there are arising, in Paris and elsewhere, associations of ouvriers and others for the better observance of the Sunday—in fact for having it made to partake more of the character of the British Sunday. It is because they.have seen the cruel tendency of the fierce competition of the age, to spare neither holiday or holiday makers, but to grind all under the Juggernaut wheels of progress ; and we have a saddening confidence in saying that the day that sees the protection of religion dragged from around the British Sunday in the colonies, that day will see not the triumph of fun and frolic merely, but the beginning of that ascendancy and tyranny of unremitting toil, which has degraded the working classes of the Continent to the position of the slaves of grinding and pitiless labour.

The following extract from a foreign paper is given to show the effect of Sunday labor in Germany:—lndustrial Germany has reached such a pass in the prosecution of its enterprise that the practice of dividing the Sunday from the rest of the week has become the exception rather than the rale. So prevalent is this disiegard of the day of rest that the Imperial Government has been making an enquiry all over the empire with a view to considering the propriety of regulating Sunday labor by legislation, and the results of the investigation have been forwarded to Washington by the United States Consul at Leipsic. The most complete statistics were gathered in Prussia, and these will afford doubtless a fairly accurate view ofthe subject. Some 500,156 establishments of all kinds in the thirty Prussian administrative district* employing 1,580,000 hands, made detailed statements from which it appears that

288,939 establishments, or 57 7 per cent., employing 068,000 hands, or 42 2 per cent.’ work on Sundays, while ths remainder do not. The larger establishments, as a general rule, do less Sunday WOik than th? sipaljer ones. In trade anil transportation the praor ties of laboring seven days in a week is even more prevalent. Here 77’6 per cent, of the establishments, and 57'8 of the. laborers, are so employed. Sqch is the condition of things in Prussia, by far the most extensive and important State of the empire, Saxony, on the other hand, prohibits Sunday labor in the manufacturing and farming industries. But this is an exception to the general practice over the empire. The figures are certainly startling, doubly so when we consider that the German laborer works more hours a day

by three and five than does the .Englishman. The whole tendency of the times in the empire seems to be in tlie direction of harder work and longer days and weeks, and to what end ? The German laborer is more poorly paid than the English laborer. In the toil of fourteen hours a day and seven days a week he reaps a less reward than does the latter in nine hours of work a day end less than six a week And how much richer materially It th* nation bqsaktfi ot It all!