ifficulties of the experiments in living that we have tried; but
the difficulties in others that we are intending to try have not yet
come to light. The Puritan Sabbath had great and very obvious evils.
Its wearisome restraints and over-strictness cast a gloom on religion,
and arrayed against the day itself the active prejudices that now are
undermining it and threatening its extinction. But it had great merits
and virtues, and produced effects on society that we cannot well
afford to dispense with. The clearing of a whole day from all
possibilities of labor and amusement necessarily produced a grave and
thoughtful people, and a democratic republic can be carried on by no
other. In lands which have Sabbaths of mere amusement, mere gala days,
republics rise and fall as quick as children's card-houses; and the
reason is, they are built by those whose political and religious
education has been childish. The common people of Europe have been
sedulously nursed on amusements by the reigning powers, to keep them
from meddling with serious matters; their religion has been sensuous
and sentimental, and their Sabbaths thoughtless holidays. The common
people of New England are educated to think, to reason, to examine all
questions of politics and religion for themselves; and one deeply
thoughtful day every week baptizes and strengthens their reflective
and reasoning faculties. The Sunday-schools of Paris are whirligigs
where Young France rides round and round on little hobby-horses till
his brain spins even faster than Nature made it to spin; and when he
grows up, his political experiments are as whirligig as his Sunday
education. If I were to choose between the Sabbath of France and the
old Puritan Sabbath, I should hold up both hands for the latter, with
all its objectionable features."

"Well," said my wife, "cannot we contrive to retain all that is really
valuable of the Sabbath, and to ameliorate and smooth away what is
forbidding?"

"That is the problem of our day," said I. "We do not want the Sabbath
of Continental Europe: it does not suit democratic institutions; it
cannot be made even a quiet or a safe day, except by means of that
ever-present armed police that exists there. If the Sabbath of America
is simply to be a universal loafing, picnicking, dining-out day, as it
is now with all our foreign population, we shall need what they have
in Europe, the gendarmes at every turn, to protect the fruit on our
trees and the m