The New York Herald

The Modern Blue Laws of Philadelphia.

In the colonial history of Connecticut we read a good deal of the blue laws of that moral and religious colony. These laws formed a code of legislation, which imposed, with characteristic puritanical severity, the necessity of virtue and propriety upon every member of the community. All the ordinary occupations of life, for every day in the week, were regulated according to this blue law system; and on some occasions it was even pronounced criminal by the laws for a barrel of beer to work upon the Sabbath day, or for a bottle of cider to pop out its cork with more than becoming noise and propriety. Such violations of decorum were considered as coming under the category of Sabbath breaking.

There is now a prospect that the ancient blue laws of Connecticut, for the purpose of preserving sacred the Sabbath day, will be outstripped by the recent blue laws of Philadelphia, enacted and enforced under the sole legislative authority and jurisdiction of the immortal, immutable, and wonderful Mayor Swift, of that city. Under a special order issued by this functionary, we understand that no fewer than sixteen little boys, whose ages range from seven to fourteen, were arrested last Sunday for selling newspapers on that day, and confined for several days in a black hole attached to his office. The little fellows, who were enabled by the sale of these papers to provide food and raiment for themselves, and mothers, and sisters, were deprived of them, and were locked up in a dark, damp, underground cell in the Mayor's office, which may now be called Mayor Swift's black hole of Calcutta.

Such is a general description of the act perpetrated under the moral sanction and stretching of law by the modern blue law Mayor of Philadelphia. To say that such a course of action is necessary, by the police of Philadelphia, to purify the morals of that city, or to preserve the sanctity of the Sabbath, would be a sarcasm of the sharpest kind. There is, perhaps, no city in the Union where such scenes of rowdyism, of violation of law, of abandoned profligacy, and unrestrained wickedness, are presented-all of which run riot with impunity, and are even winked at by the authorities. Perhaps no city in the Union can lay claim to such unenviable pre-eminence in the perpetration of crime, such violation of social order, and such disregard of law, as the "City of Brotherly Love." "How are the mighty fallen!" may be the exclamation of any one who compares the present condition of that city with the days when Wm. Penn first gave it that name which has now become such a misnomer. "Quantum mutata ab illa."

And yet, in the face of such a state of things, which is in a great measure to be attributed to the connivance of the magistrates, and the supineness and negligence of the police authorities, we see a violent attempt made to interfere with the sale of Sunday newspapers, under the pretence of watching over the sanctity of the Sabbath, and preserving it sacred and unprofaned. On the same day, you will find all the worst houses of bad repute open in Philadelphia, and the filthiest purlieus of iniquity inviting to every kind of immorality and profligacy, and the incitements to the demoralization of the people openly countenanced, and, we might almost say, legalized, by the magistracy and police of Philadelphia.