What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 7

State; national Prohibition did not strike at the heart of State sovereignty as did national regulation of the suffrage. But the abstract question of sovereignty has had little interest for the nation since the Civil War; and if we waive that abstract question, the Prohibition Amendment was an infinitely more vital thrust at the principle of State selfgovernment. The Woman Suffrage Amendment was the assertion of a fundamental principle of government, and if it was an abridgment of sovereignty it was an abridgment of the same character as those embodied in the Constitution from the beginning, the Prohibition Amendment brought the Federal Government into control of precisely those intimate concerns of daily life which, above all else, had theretofore been left untouched by the central power, and subject to the independent jurisdiction of each individual State. The South had eagerly swallowed a camel, and when it asked the country to strain at a gnat it found nobody to listen. Our public men, and our leaders of opinion, frequently and earnestly express their concern over the decline of importance in our State governments, the lessened vigor of the State spirit. The sentiment is not peculiar to any party or to any section; it is expressed with equal emphasis and with equal frequency by leading Republicans and leading Democrats, by Northerners and Southerners. All feel alike that with the decay of State spirit a virtue will go out of our national spirit--that a centralized America will be a devitalized America. But when they discuss the subject, they are in the habit of referring chiefly to defects in administration; to neglect of duty by the average citizen or perhaps by those in high places in business or the professions; to want of intelligence in the Legislature, etc. And for all this there is much reason; yet all this we have had always with us, and it is not always that we have had with us this sense of the decline of State spirit. For that decline the chief cause is the gradual, yet steady and rapid, extension of national power and lowering of the comparative importance of the functions of the State. However, the functions that still remain to the State--and its subdivisions, the municipalities and counties --are still of enormous importance; and, with the growth of public-welfare activities which are ramifying in so many directions, that importance may be far greater in the future. But what is to become of it if we are ready to surrender to the central government the control of our most intimate concerns? And what concern can be so intimate as that of the conduct of the individual citizen in the pursuit of his daily life? How can the idea of the State as an object of pride or as a source of authority flourish when the most elementary of its functions is supinely abandoned to the custody of a higher and a stronger power? The Prohibition Amendment has done more to sap the vitality of our State system than could be done by a hundred years of misrule at Albany or Harrisburg or Springfield. The effects of that misrule are more directly apparent, but they leave the State spirit untouched in its vital parts. The Prohibition Amendment strikes at the root of that spirit, and its evil precedent, if unreversed, will steadily cut off the source from which that spirit derives its life.
CHAPTER IV
HOW THE AMENDMENT WAS PUT THROUGH
THERE has been a vast amount of controversy over the question whether a majority of the American people favored the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment. There is no possible way to settle that question. Even future votes, if any can be had that may be looked upon as referendum votes, cannot settle it, whichever way they may turn out. If evidence should come to hand which indicates that a majority of the American people favor the retention of the Amendment now that it is an accomplished fact, this will not prove that they favored its adoption in the first place; it may be that they wish to give it a fuller trial, or it may be that they do not wish to go through the upheaval and disturbance of a fresh agitation of the question or it may be some other reason quite different from what was in the situation four years ago. On the other hand, if the referendum should seem adverse, this might be due to disgust at the lawlessness that has developed in connection with the Prohibition Amendment, or to a realization of the vast amount of discontent it has aroused, or to something else that was not in the minds of the majority when the Amendment was put through. But really the question is of very little importance. From the standpoint of fundamental political