The Sun. — 1849-06-29 (London, England)

LONDON, FRIDAY, JUNE 29, 1849.  Another example has just been afforded to the absurdity of attempting to legislate for the diffusion of abstract morality. The Anti-Sunday-Trading movement and the Anti-Sunday- Travelling movement were extravagant enough in themselves; but the Bill recently introduced into the House of Commons under the auspices of Mr. SPOONER, a Bill which originally emanated from the House of Peers, and received the approval of the Lord Chief Baron, certainly strikes us as being an example of the very acme of morbid delicacy and religious sentimentalism. With all our hearts we respect those who conscientiously abstain from unnecessary labour on the Sunday; and our respect is not one jot less profound and sincere for those who, by affording at once the precepts and the practice of chastity, aid in the diminution of such illicit habits of concupiscence AS tend so materially to the propagation of vice and wretchedness in a populous community. At the same time, we cannot but regard the ust.stion of the law for the maintenance of the sanctity of the Sunday, and for the suppression, or rather for the gradual extinction of prostitution, as an effort requiring the most discriminative caution in its employment. The line of demarcation between the Divine and Human codes is so strong and visible in theory, and so feeble and almost imperceptible in fact, that it is necessary to exercise the most continual and vigilant circumspection to prevent the infringement of the one by the other. It is from our solicitude to witness no glaring interference with the ecclesiastical polity, and from our knowledge of the extreme liability of a political legislature to outstep its rightful limits when touching upon these delicate subjects, that we are averse to that indiscriminate interposition with matters properly belonging to those appointed to the exercise of spiritual authority, and not to those in whose hands are confided the rt. ponsibilities of temporal jurisdiction. There is no greater fallacy abroad than the notion that a nation may be rendered moral by Acts of Parliament. Depravity flourishes not so much in the market-place as in the haunts of obscurity. Men are habit of gratifying their evil pasnot usually in the sions under the nose of public scrutiny. To employ a vulgar but expres,ive phrase, the thief is only a thief on the sly : the forger is only a forger on the sly : even murder is done on the sly, and adultery, and all those heinous offences which cry aloud to heaven for vengeance. So long as this secrecy is the instinct of licentiousness so long will it be vain on the past of the Legislature to attempt to enforce morality by punishment.  comprehended by the originators and supporters of that very decorous but very impracticable measure called the Bill for the Protection of Women. As to the motive out of which the Bill has emanate nothing could be more pure, more noble, more generous or more entitled to our respect. Still that purity, that nobleness, and that generosity fail to render the measure one atom the more practicable. And for this reason, together with the goodness of the motive, we are compelled to recognize the fact that the sentiment of the thing is of the most morbid description. Not only have all the law Lords discountenanced the project as one whose good consequences are altogether chimerical, but the Bill has been exposed, in all its deformity and extravagance, by the keen and analytic remarks of the