Following the order of Sheriff Beck, for the first time in years the saloons were close up last Sunday both front doors and back, also the edict has gone forth that on week-days they must all be closed at eleven o’clock at night. This is a complete departure from the traditions and customs in Hancock.
The Wage-Slave is in complete sympathy with the policy of closing up at eleven o’clock on any day of the week. That seems to us a sensible hour. By that time the quiet citizen can certainly have secured what beer he needs, if he wants any, and those who linger to sip later are in grave danger of getting drunk and proving a nuisance. We believe the liquor men, too, will generally fall in with the plan of closing at eleven o’clock without any objection and that this will prove of benefit to the whole community.
Sunday closing is another matter. The man who wants a glass of beer or wine has as much right to have it on Sunday as on any other day of the week, and to buy it over the bar, and enjoy it in company if he prefers.
Sunday closing is an outrageous and high-handed piece of class legislation designed to force the workingman to go to church by closing up all other places where he might congregate. Wherever the churches have been able to do so, they have sought not only to close up the saloons on that particular day of the week, but the theaters, and even the parks and Art Museums also. This has been undertaken solely in the interest of the attendance and, of course, the collections at the churches.
The Wage Slave is an enemy to drunkenness and disorder, but we are also an enemy to religious legislation. If anyone believes that a particular day of the week is too sacred to buy and drink a glass of beer on that say, that is his privilege; this is supposed to be a free county in matters of religious belief, but it does not give him the right to dictate terms of belief and practice to others who may think differently.
“One man esteemeth one day above another, another man esteemeth every day alike, let every man be fully ersuaded in his own mind.”-The Bible. (Rom. XIV-5.) What is equally important, let him attend to his own affairs and so give other people a chance to attend to theirs.
There are other interests also at work in the interest of Sunday laws. On his trip to Laurium on Sunday last the Editor overheard a well-known Mining Captain in the electric car “though not a temperance man himself” as he put it, endorsing Sunday closing on the ground that the miners would be in a better condition now to work and make profits for the Company on the Monday following.
We would suggest too, to the officials of Houghton Country that if they intend to enforce Sunday closing laws, they would do well first to clean up on the tough joins in Houghton before they pull a decent fellow who has always kept a quiet place where neither boys, drunks, nor women are allowed, for letting a quiet party of friends enjoy a bottle of been in his basement, while meddling with nobody.