THE SUNDAY LEAGUE.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 57, 31 October 1912, Page 2

THE SUNDAY LEAGUE.

There died recently in London a man of whom it has been said that “no man on earth has done so much to destroy the English Sabbath.” This was Mr R. M. Morrell, the founder of the National Sunday League, who had but a week before celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday. Mr Morrell started life avs apprentice to., a firm of manufacturing jewellers. When he was thirty, experience convinced him that the English Sunday, as it then was, should' be reformed, resolved to do something towards relieving what he regarded as the tedium weekly inflicted on millions of his fellow creatures, he formed.in 1855 the. National Sunday League, which obtained the support of such men as Huxley. Owen, Carpenter, and Charles Dickens. The League established what were known as “Popular Sunday Evenings for t'hc| People,” and in the teeth of mighty opposition succeeded in obtaining the opening of museums and art galleries on Sunday, and, later, still, permission for bands to play in the public parks. Dickens, by the way, was among the first to contribute towards the maintenance of Sunday bands, which are now paid for out of the rates and regarded as a regular, institution. The fight was a strenuous one, and Mr Morrell often suffered not only social set-backs, but actual physical violence for his advanced opinions. Compelled by the work of the League to leave his old employer, he was financed by wealthy friends, and in 1885 was enabled to retire from the newsagent’s business he had taken up, and devote himself undisturbed to his life work. One of the objects of the League, which has not yet been fully attained, was the Sunday theatre, and it is curious to note that when Mr Morrell died, a controversy was going on as to the desirability of opening the theatres on that day. John Stuart Mill, while apparently supporting such opening, advised the League, 'in view of the then state of the drama and the feelings of a large section of the public, not to put it in their programme “for the present.” That was many years ago, but the opposition to the extension is still so strong, in the profos-

sion and out of it, that Sunday playgoing in England is still very much a thing of the future.