In the city where I live, a city supposed to be free and enlightened, but in reality heavily burdened with churches, there are tennis courts built and paid for out of public funds, my own included; yet I cannot use these tennis courts on Sunday, because of the ancient Hebrew taboo.  My mail is not 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 would return to this institution regularly every week unless he abandoned his godless habit of playing tennis on a private club court on Sunday; he only escaped the painful punishment by making the discovery that at the Wilmington Country Club it was the custom of the leading officials of the city and state to play golf every Sunday, and by threatening to employ detectives and have these mighty ones arrested and sent to their own prison.  Which shows again the importance of understanding this relationship of Superstition and Big Business!