What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 3

the emphasis has been placed on
the perversion of what was designed as a safeguard of liberty into a

safeguard of the denial of liberty. But even if no issue of liberty entered
into the case, an amendment that embodied a mere police regulation
would be a degradation of the Constitution. In the earlier days of our
history --indeed up to a comparatively recent time-- if any one had
suggested such a thing as a Prohibition amendment to the Federal
Constitution, he would have been met not with indignation but with
ridicule. It would not have been the monstrosity, but the absurdity, of
such a proposal, that would have been first in the thought of almost any
intelligent American to whom it might have been presented. He would
have felt that such a feature was as utterly out of place in the
Constitution of the United States as would be a statute regulating the
height of houses or the length of women's skirts. It might be as
meritorious as you please in itself, but it didn't belong in the
Constitution. If the Constitution is to command the kind of respect
which shall make it the steadfast bulwark of our institutions, the
guaranty of our union and our welfare, it must preserve the character
that befits such an instrument. The Eighteenth Amendment, if it were
not odious as a perversion of the power of the Constitution, would be
contemptible as an offense against its dignity.
CHAPTER II
CREATING A NATION OF LAW- BREAKERS
IN his baccalaureate address as President of Yale University, in June,
1922, Dr. Angell felt called upon to say that in this country "the
violation of law has never been so general nor so widely condoned as at
present," and to add these impressive words of appeal to the young
graduates:
This is a fact which strikes at the very heart of our system of
government, and the young man entering upon his active career must
decide whether he too will condone and even abet such disregard of
law, or whether he will set his face firmly against such a course.
It is safe to say that there has never been a time in the history of our
country when the President of a great university could have found it

necessary to address the young Americans before him in any such
language. There has never been a time when deliberate disregard of law
was habitual among the classes which represent culture, achievement,
and wealth-- the classes among whom respect for law is usually
regarded as constant and instinctive. That such disregard now prevails
is an assertion for which President Angell did not find it necessary to
point to any evidence. It is universally admitted. Friends of Prohibition
and enemies of Prohibition, at odds on everything else, are in entire
agreement upon this. It is high time that thinking people went beyond
the mere recognition of this fact and entered into a serious examination
of the cause to which it is to be ascribed. Perhaps I should say the
causes, for of course more causes than one enter into the matter. But I
say the cause, for the reason that there is one cause which transcends all
others, both in underlying importance and in the permanence of its
nature. That cause does not reside in any special extravagances that
there may be in the Volstead act. The cardinal grievance against which
the unprecedented contempt for law among high-minded and
law-abiding people is directed is not the Volstead act but the
Eighteenth Amendment. The enactment of that Amendment was a
monstrosity so gross that no thinking American thirty years ago would
have regarded it as a possibility. It is not only a crime against the
Constitution of the United States, and not only a crime against the
whole spirit of our Federal system, but a crime against the first
principles of rational government. The object of the Constitution of the
United States is to imbed in the organic law of the country certain
principles, and certain arrangements for the distribution of power,
which shall be binding in a peculiar way upon generation after
generation of the American people. Once so imbedded, it may prove to
be impossible by anything short of a revolution to get them out, even
though a very great majority of the people should desire to do so.
If laws regulating the ordinary personal conduct of individuals are to be
entrenched in this way, one of the first conditions of respect for law
necessarily falls to the ground. That practical maxim which is always
appealed to, and rightly appealed to, in behalf of an unpopular law--the
maxim that if the law is bad the way to get it repealed is to obey it and
enforce it--loses its validity. If