religion. Were conditions the same in England as they are, say, in Italy, many who would not now oppose the scheme might become strong supporters of it. The anxiety that many sincere men feel is that, until something is done to enlighten the British public upon the true Christian purpose of Sunday, the opening of Wembley will add to a popular use of the Lord's Day which, if it is not consciously irreligious, is certainly not religious. This feeling is reasonable, and it is inspired by a sincere desire for the true welfare of the British Empire.

It is not possible, at the moment of writing, to say whether Sir Guy Gaunt will succeed in his effort to get Wembley opened on Sunday. Apparently it is not a well-known Act of Charles II. which stands in the way, but a much later one of George III. The Act of Charles II. deals with trading; the later one, of 1781, forbids public entertainment or amusements in wide terms where money is taken for admission. A legal correspondent of the Sunday Times speaks of the Stuart and Hanoverian laws as a 'patchwork' concern which Government after Government has lacked the courage to revise because of the controversial issues involved. He remarks, and with perfect justice :

The anomalies of the law are very well illustrated by the Sunday opening of the picture-houses. An Act of 1909 gave local authorities power to impose conditions on the proprietors, and the London County Council issued a licence to one with a veto on Sunday opening. He took the matter into court, urging that the Council had no power to impose the veto, since the scope of the Act was limited to safety. He lost the case, but it has since been assumed, upon this extremely doubtful basis, that a county council has power to license Sunday performances. The issue whether such performances would offend against the Act of 1781 was not decided, but there is nothing in the Cinematograph Act to override the old statute, and if the point were squarely raised, it is difficult to see why the latter would not apply. A short investigation has left the writer under the strong impression that every public opening of a cinematograph exhibition for money on Sundays is a tolerated illegality, like club sweepstakes, prizefights, and the presence of Jesuits in a land where the law imposes banishment for life on them. Laws which are publicly flouted, of course, bring our whole system into disrespect.

The Act of 1781 is directed against entertainments for which payment is made, and if the Exhibition were thrown open or partially thrown open to the public, it would not apply. It has been held that payment for reserved seats may be exacted if a reasonable number are admitted free. Whether payment for refreshments, reserved seats for bands, etc., would render free public entry profitable, will no doubt be considered. But while the public has free access to the sob-stuff and inanities of the films, the Hanoverian veto on the Sunday opening of the Exhibition seems foolish.

Sir Guy Gaunt is credited with making an attempt to get a short enabling Bill through the House. If he succeeds, which is improbable, the Act will make another complication in a state of affairs humiliating to those of us who desire that the Lord's Day

should be kept in a manner creditable to Christians. I for one hate the very idea of basing any appeal for Sunday observance upon a musty code of Lord's Day Observance Acts' which would, if applied, literally place every man who sells or buys a Sunday paper in the stocks.

Mr. Gavan Duffy, M.P., proposed at a recent demonstration in Hyde Park a somewhat ingenious motion protesting against the contemplated closing of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley on Sundays.' The Yorkshire Post of March 17 con denses his speech as follows:

Mr. Gavan Duffy, M.P., in proposing the resolution, said there was not a single trade union representative who had been approached in the matter who was not whole-heartedly in favour of it. He and many others were against legislation which was passed in 1623. They did not directly or So far as

indirectly desire to loosen the sacred bonds of the Sabbath Day. they were concerned, they believed that the educational value to be derived from Wembley on a Sunday would not in any way desecrate, but rather exalt, human genius, as well as the Sabbath Day. He did not desire people to work a seven-day week. They had a large number of unemployed ex-service men who would be glad to do a day's work on Sunday at the Sunday rate of pay.

It is not with Mr. Duffy's conclusions I am at the moment concerned. It is with his premises and deductions. He assumes,

it will be noticed, without apparent qualification, that Sunday is the Sabbath, and he deduces that the Sabbath Day will be 'exalted '-together with human genius-by the educational value to be derived from Wembley. It is quite possible that Mr. Duffy himself understands as much as any Italian the positive Christian duty of worship. It is inconceivable that any Italian would have argued like Mr. Duffy to attain the same end. But then on the Continent the mass of the people understand that the Christian basis of Sunday observance is worship. In England they do not understand.

Mr. Gavan Duffy further states that all the trades unionists he has consulted think as he does about the opening of Wembley on Sunday. Is that surprising? The trades unionists are far from being irreligious. Many of them are devout worshippers in their respective churches. The Ministers of the Labour Government, indeed, sometimes appear to regard themselves as the peculiar exponents of the Sermon on the Mount, and all who came before them as thieves and robbers. But may it not be true that the Labour Party have a very inadequate conception of Sunday observance, and are they not in danger of depreciating the religious value of Sunday observance as a national asset? One trades unionist, only a few days ago, remarked to me: 'Our chaps are set on turning Sunday into a day of politics. They can see nowt else.' It is this inability to see any other purport in Sunday that

really matters. If political meetings take the place of worship, if they leave no time nor inclination for worship, can trades unionism be cleared from responsibility for the state of affairs which many of their own number view with grave anxiety? There need be nothing religiously wrong with political meetings simply because they are held on Sunday, that is if such meetings are put in their right place and in proper proportion. If they leave no place for religion, they are irreligious, but if, as might be the case abroad, they are co-ordinated with religious observance, I can see no necessary religious objections to them except those of expediency. It is quite true that the Labour movement on the Continent is often positively irreligious, far more so than in England, but this cannot be laid down to ignorance of the Christian use of Sunday. There are other causes which are well known not only to enemies, but to friends, of Labour.

A candid critic recently vouchsafed his opinion to me that already in England we had a Continental Sunday without the Mass, and having outworn Protestantism, we had found a refuge in paganism. I have no intention of treading upon the tail of the coat so alluringly trailed before me. I have no desire to reproduce a Continental Sunday in this country in its religious details. It may be possible that our true English traditions are safer for us to build upon than those upon which other nations have built. None the less there is sufficient truth in the criticism to prove that sweeping condemnations of Continental Sundays, made in comparison with our own methods, are neither wise nor in accordance with facts. The strong side of a Continental Sunday is the great emphasis laid upon worship and consequent brightness of the day. The weak side is an assumption, not made by all, that, having consecrated the beginning of the day to God, the remainder does not matter. It is the strength, not the weakness, of a Continental Sunday which all friends of Sunday may wish earnestly could be added to our English traditions.

So far as England is concerned, the radical weakness of Sunday observance for the past two or three centuries has been its negative character. From this, and only partially from the consequent reaction against arbitrary restrictions, has come a wide-spread disregard of worship which is neither Christian nor pagan. There is another tradition of Sunday observance in England which is older than Puritanism, and which has never been dislodged from an honourable position in our national religious life. The story of an ideal observance of an English Sunday in the seventeenth century is told in the pages of John Inglesant. Nicholas Ferrar led his household in church and in service with devotion and thoroughness which are characteristic of what is called definitely 'the religious life.' The motive behind the observances at Little

Gidding was positive, not negative. In the seventeenth century were enacted the Sabbatarian laws which still govern Sunday observance, but at the same time there were growing up societies of men and women who did not focus their attention on what other people should not do, but bound themselves to a holy and religious life, to regular participation in the Lord's Supper, and to carry out Church principles. The outcome of these societies was that the Holy Communion was celebrated every Sunday, and the custom of preparing people in church to take part in the Holy Eucharist survived one of the dreariest periods of English Church history.

By all means get rid of the heavy atmosphere which Charles Dickens described as being 'gloomy, close and stale,' but in doing so try to regain that which the bulk of the people of this country have lost-the idea that worship is the true observance of what is primarily the Dies Domini. This is the day that the Lord hath made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.'

GEORGE H. FRODSHAM,

Bishop.

THE FRENCH ELECTION

THE General Election in France will take place on the 11th of the present month. This date was not fixed upon without opposition. M. Mandel-Clemenceau's former Secretary-and M. Léon Daudet, the Royalist leader, were against it, because they considered that an election coming so soon after the Chamber had voted the new taxes was tantamount to driving the majority of this Chamber to the shambles.' Many other deputies insisted that it was unwise to let the French electorate go to the polls without being clear about the results of the German election which is to take place only a week beforehand. President Millerand is said to have favoured this view, which, at all events, his occasional mouthpiece, M. Gustave Hervé, championed in La Victoire. But the French Government does not possess the privilege of prorogation, any more than it possesses the privilege of dissolution (a deficiency which President Millerand publicly deplored at one of the last sittings of the Academy of Political Sciences, of which he is a member). The French Chamber is elected for four years and a half; that is to say, its successor has to meet on June 1, and as there may be in a number of places a second ballot, a fortnight after the first, it was imperative, if the law were not to be overridden, that the election should be held, at the latest, on May II. But M. Poincaré is too much of a jurist, even too much of a legalist, to override any law, much as he would have preferred a later date.

There was an even more animated contest about the mode of voting at the General Election. Proportional Representation, that is to say, the wholesale election in a département of seven or eight deputies representing the votes given to their party, was tried for the first time on November 16, 1919, instead of the former vote by constituencies copied from England. It resulted, as the reader no doubt remembers, in an overwhelming majority for the National Party defined—rather than actually created-by Clemenceau, and recommended to the country by M. Millerand in a famous address at the Ba-Ta-Clan Music-hall. For the first time in thirty years the Radicals found themselves in opposition and could not believe their own eyes. They had feebly opposed Proportional Representation and blamed themselves bitterly for their mistake.