How far our Sunday laws are meant to encourage the peculiar usages of the popular sects is seen in the fact that, since 1877, about 150 professed Christians, who had kept the Sabbath on the day set apart in the Bible, were arrested on the charge of having profaned Sunday by such actions as ploughing a retired field, weeding a garden, cutting wood needed for immediate use, or making a dress. They refused to pay any fine; most of them were imprisoned accordingly; in one case the confinement lasted 129 days; two deaths were hastened by incarceration; and in the summer of 1895 eight of these "Saturdarians," as they were nicknamed, were working in a chain-gang on the roads in Tennessee. One of the eight was a clergyman. Among the commonwealths which prosecuted observers of the original Sabbath as Sabbath-breakers were Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and seven other States. Such prosecutions were too much like persecutions; for people who kept neither Saturday nor Sunday were not so much molested. If the Sunday laws were really meant for the public welfare, every citizen would be allowed to choose his own Sabbath, and no one who kept Saturday sacred would be required to rest on Sunday also. Such liberal legislation has actually been passed by Rhode Island and many other States. How strict the law is against doing business on Sunday may be judged from the fact that in 1896 a decrepit old woman was sent to jail in New York City for selling a couple of bananas, and a boy of fifteen was arrested for selling five cents' worth of coal in January. Three men were fined for selling umbrellas in the street on a rainy Sunday in 1895, and others were arrested for selling five cents' worth of ice. People who have no refrigerators suffer under the difficulty of buying ice, fruit, and meat on a hot Sunday in our Eastern cities.