What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 6

have proved successful, State after State has followed the example set by one or a few among their number; when they have been disappointing in their results, the rest of the Union has profited by the warning. But, highly important as is this aspect of State independence, the most essential benefits of it are the training in self-government which is emphasized in the above quotation from Mr. Nordhoff, and the adaptation of laws to the particular needs and the particular character of the people of the various States. That modern conditions have inevitably led to a vast enlargement of the powers of the central government, no thinking person can deny. It would be folly to attempt to stick to the exact division of State functions as against national which was natural when the Union was first formed. The railroad, the telegraph, and the telephone, the immense development of industrial, commercial, and financial organization, the growth of interwoven interests of a thousand kinds, have brought the people of California and New York, of Michigan and Texas, into closer relations than were common between those of Massachusetts and Virginia in the days of Washington and John Adams. In so far as the process of centralization has been dictated by the clear necessities of the times, it would be idle to obstruct it or to cry out against it. But, so far from this being an argument against the preservation of the essentials of local self-government, it is the strongest possible argument in favor of that preservation. With the progress of science, invention, and business organization, the power and prestige of the central government are bound to grow, the power and prestige of the State governments are bound to decline, under the pressure of economic necessity and social convenience; all the more, then, does it behoove us to sustain those essentials of State authority which are not comprised within the domain of those overmastering economic forces. If we do not hold the line where the line can be held, we give up the cause altogether; and it will be only a question of time when we shall have drifted into complete subjection to a centralized government, and State boundaries will have no more serious significance than county boundaries have now. But if there is one thing in the wide world the control of which naturally and preeminently belongs to the individual State and not to the central government at Washington, that thing is the personal conduct and habits of the people of the State. If it is right and proper that the people of New York or Illinois or Maryland shall be subjected to a national law which declares what they may or may not eat or drink--a law which they cannot themselves alter, no matter how strongly they may desire it--then there is no act of centralization whatsoever which can be justly objected to as an act of centralization. The Prohibition Amendment is not merely an impairment of the principle of self-government of the States; it constitutes an absolute abandonment of that principle. This does not mean, of course, an immediate abandonment of the practice of State self-government; established institutions have a tenacious life, and moreover there are a thousand practical advantages in State selfgovernment which nobody will think of giving up. But the principle, I repeat, is abandoned altogether if we accept the Eighteenth Amendment as right and proper; and if anybody imagines that the abandonment of the principle is of no practical consequence, he is woefully deluded. So long as the principle is held in esteem, it is always possible to make a stout fight against any particular encroachment upon State authority; any proposed encroachment must prove its claim to acceptance not only as a practical desideratum but as not too flagrant an invasion of State prerogatives. But with the Eighteenth Amendment accepted as a proper part of our system, it will be impossible to object to any invasion as more flagrant than that to which the nation has already given its approval. A striking illustration of this has, curiously enough, been furnished in the brief time that has passed since the adoption or the eighteenth Amendment. Southern Senators and Representatives and Legislaturemen who, for getting all about their cherished doctrine of State rights, had fallen over themselves in their eagerness to fasten the Eighteenth Amendment upon the country, suddenly discovered that they were deeply devoted to that doctrine when the Nineteenth Amendment came up for consideration. But nobody would listen to them. They professed--and doubtless some of them sincerely professed-- to find an essential difference between putting Woman Suffrage into the Constitution and putting Prohibition into the Constitution. The determination of the right of suffrage was, they said, the most fundamental attribute of a sovereign State; national Prohibition did