What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 4

a majority cannot repeal the law--if it is

perfectly conceivable, and even probable, that generation after
generation may pass without the will of the majority having a chance to
be put into effect--then it is idle to expect intelligent freemen to bow
down in meek submission to its prescriptions. Apart from the question
of distribution of governmental powers, it was until recently a matter of
course to say that the purpose of the Constitution was to protect the
rights of minorities. That it might ever be perverted to exactly the
opposite purpose--to the purpose of fastening not only upon minorities
but even upon majorities for an unlimited future the will of the majority
for the time being--certainly never crossed the mind of any of the great
men who framed the Constitution of the United States. Yet this is
precisely what the Prohibition mania has done. The safeguards
designed to protect freedom against thoughtless or wanton invasion
have been seized upon as a means of protecting a denial of freedom
against any practical possibility of repeal. Upon a matter concerning the
ordinary practices of daily life, we and our children and our children's
children are deprived of the possibility of taking such action as we
think fit unless we can obtain the assent of twothirds of both branches
of Congress and the Legislatures of three-fourths of the States. To live
under such a dispensation in such a matter is to live without the first
essentials of a government of freemen. I admit that all this is not clearly
in the minds of most of the people who break the law, or who condone
or abet the breaking of the law. Nevertheless it is virtually in their
minds. For, whenever an attempt is made to bring about a substantial
change in the Prohibition law, the objection is immediately made that
such a change would necessarily amount to a nullification of the
Eighteenth Amendment. And so it would. People therefore feel in their
hearts that they are confronted practically with no other choice but that
of either supinely submitting to the full rigor of Prohibition, of trying to
procure a law which nullifies the Constitution, or of expressing their
resentment against an outrage on the first principles of the Constitution
by contemptuous disregard of the law. It is a choice of evils; and it is
not surprising that many good citizens regard the last of the three
choices as the best. How far this contempt and this disregard has gone
is but very imperfectly indicated by the things which were doubtless in
President Angell's mind, and which are in the minds of most persons
who publicly express their regret over the prevalence of law-breaking.

What they are thinking about, what the Anti-Saloon League talks about,
what the Prohibition enforcement officers expend their energy upon, is
the sale of alcoholic drinks in public places and by bootleggers. But
where the bootlegger and the restaurant-keeper counts his thousands,
home brew counts its tens of thousands. To this subject there is a
remarkable absence of attention on the part of the Anti-Saloon League
and of the Prohibition enforcement service. They know that there are
not hundreds of thousands but millions of people breaking the law by
making their own liquors, but they dare not speak of it. They dare not
go even so far as to make it universally known that the making of home
brew is a violation of the law. To this day a very considerable number
of people who indulge in the practice are unaware that it is a violation
of the law. And the reason for this careful and persistent silence is only
too plain. To make conspicuous before the whole American people the
fact that the law is being steadily and complacently violated in millions
of decent American homes would bring about a realization of the
demoralizing effect of Prohibition which its sponsors, fanatical as they
are, very wisely shrink from facing.
How long this demoralization may last I shall not venture to predict.
But it will not be overcome in a day; and it will not be overcome at all
by means of exhortations. It is possible that enforcement will gradually
become more and more efficient, and that the spirit of resistance may
thus gradually be worn out. On the other hand it is also possible that
means of evading the law may become more and more perfected by
invention and otherwise, and that the melancholy and humiliating
spectacle which we are now witnessing may be of very long duration.
But in any case it has already lasted long enough to do incalculable and
almost ineradicable harm. And for all this it is utterly idle to place the
blame on those qualities of human nature which have led to the
violation of