delivered to me, the swimming pool in the park
is closed to me, the library is closed nearly all day. If I enquire
about it, I am told that it is desirable that city employees should
have one day's rest a week; but when I ask why it might not be
possible to relay the employees, so that they might all have one, or
even two days' rest a week, and still give the public their rights on
Sunday, there is no answer. But I know the answer, having probed our
politics of hypocrisy. There is a "church vote" at which all
politicians tremble; there are clergymen, humanly jealous when their
peculiar graft is threatened, and hoping that if the law enforces a
general boredom, the public may be more disposed to endure the boredom
of sermons.

In New York City the theaters are closed on Sunday; but moving
pictures having come into being since the days of Puritan rule, the
picture-shows are free to keep open. The law permits "sacred
concerts"--which, under the benevolent sway of Tammany, has come to
mean any sort of vaudeville; so what we have is a free rein to the
imbecilities of "Mutt & Jeff" and the obscenities of Anna Held and
Gaby Deslys--while we bar the greatest moralists of our times, such as
Ibsen and Brieux.

I speak with some crossness of this Sabbath taboo, because of an
experience which once befell me. In the second decade of this century
of enlightenment and progress, in our free American democracy, whose
constitution proclaims religious toleration, and forbids the
establishment by the state of any form of worship, I was made to serve
a sentence of eighteen hours in the state prison of Delaware for
playing a game of tennis on the Sabbath. I was duly arrested upon a
warrant, duly sentenced by a magistrate, duly clad in a prison
costume, duly set to work upon a stone-pile, duly locked up over night
in a steel-barred cell full of vermin--in a building housing some five
hundred wretches, black and white, thirty of them serving life-terms
under circumstances which never permitted them a breath of fresh air
nor a glimpse of the sunshine or the sky. They had no exercise court
to their prison, and the inmates were not permitted to speak to one
another, but ate their meals in dead silence, and walked back to their
cells with folded arms, and had their only occupation working for a
sweat-shop contractor; this on the outskirts of the pious city of
Wilmington, with no less than ninety-one churches! The writer was
informed that he wou