instead of a fine not exceeding ten dollars, the former penalty, it would seem that the intention must have been to provide a penalty commensurate with the gravest breaches of the statute. What are these, if they be not the running of passenger and freight railway trains, whose mercenary noise makes havoc of all Sunday calm and quiet; the repairing of railway tracks and bridges, the gangs of workmen oft so large and belligerent enough to take a city; the repairing of machinery in shops and mills; the racket of the press turning out Sunday editions of newspapers secular as politics and earthly as a quack medicine advertisement? These truly are open and most gross violations of the law, but against them what murmur has been heard taking the form of prosecution? Nay, the breaches of the law that are prosecuted and have been are for the most part the petty breaches, while the more flagrant offenders, as a rule, have offended with impunity and still so offend. Considering, therefore, the sturdiness with which the people of the commonwealth resist the law's repeal, and the indifference with which they treat its violations, it must be confessed that Artemus Ward's sarcasm, as applied to "prohibition," applies here with peculiar force--in favor of the law, but against its enforcement. ("The Sunday Law of Massachusetts," by a member of the Massachusetts bar, p. 29.) Puck, in its history of the United States, says: "The Puritans instituted many beautiful customs, and they had some very remarkable laws. They provided strict penalties against Sabbath breaking. On Sunday, they decreed that every able-bodied man, woman, and child in the country should go to church three times a day. They forbade reading anything except the Bible, forbade walking in the fields, and generally shut down on amusements. Then they called it the Lord's day, and thus strove to make the Lord unpopular." Ben. Franklin on Connecticut Sundays. The following is an extract from a letter written by Dr. Franklin to Jared Ingersoll of New Haven. The original is in the possession of the New Haven Colony Historical Society: Philadelphia, Dec. 11, 1762.