BLUE LAWS

Petitions have long since lost their strength in moving the regulated powers, and the reformer, crying incessantly to heaven for the fulfillment of his desire, ultimately loses his breath and ends with whispering pathos and a cracked voice dying into silence. Yet even at the certain doom of the reformer, again we raise our voice to query, not defiantly nor boisterously, but humbly, why Sunday sports are still barred at the University.

From that dim age when the gay college boys observed the day of rest in a three-hour sermon, a longer dinner, and the remainder of the time in reading Numbers, recreation on Sunday has been in the moral eyes of the righteous the next thing to uncleanliness, and far worse than fratricide. Unending generations of college men have striven for ways whereby the boathouses, the tennis courts, and the athletic fields might be opened. And for all their striving, there is perhaps as much relaxation around Harvard Square on the Sabbath as there was in the time of John Harvard. Surely not more, for then they had the Indians.

For those men who are now in the Corps, Saturday afternoon and Sunday, offer the sole chance for variation of the round of drill. Saturday afternoon is generally necessary for the completion of such necessary transactions as may arise during the week. There are men who have rowed for two or three years, and to whom pulling an oar means the greatest sport in life, who are now barred from enjoyment of their recreation. There are tennis players and other men with a hobby in sports who have not here opportunity in their one holiday of the week for clean and healthy fun.

It is well enough to talk about the sanctity of the Sabbath. But youth will be served. And men who may not find recreation around Cambridge will seek it outside, at the beaches and amusement parks, where religion is not especially fostered. It is not a question of observing the Sabbath according to the strict letter, or of neglecting it in tennis and rowing. It is a question of neglecting it in tennis and rowing, or of contemning it in less natural amusements.

The prohibition of Sunday sports may be as iron-bound as the laws of the Medes and the Persians. But the Medes and the Persians being dead, their laws are not worth the traditional scrap of paper. So the dulators of our present laws should not exercise in part an authority which they ceased generations ago to exercise in spirit. The Blue Laws may well be stricken with blue lightning, and vanish in blue smoke.