What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 5

the law. Of those qualities some are reprehensible and
some are not only blameless but commendable. The great guilt is not
that of the law-breakers but that of the lawmakers. It is childish to
imagine that every law, no matter what its nature, can command respect.
Nothing would be easier than to imagine laws which a very
considerable number of perfectly wellmeaning people would be glad to
have enacted, but which if enacted it would be not only the right, but

the duty, of sound citizens to ignore. I do not say that the Eighteenth
Amendment falls into this category. But it comes perilously near to
doing so, and thousands of the best American citizens think that it
actually does do so. It has degraded the Constitution of the United
States. It has created a division among the people of the United States
comparable only to that which was made by the awful issue of slavery
and secession. That issue was a result of deepseated historical causes in
the face of which the wisdom and patriotism of three generations of
Americans found itself powerless. This new cleavage has been caused
by an act of legislative folly unmatched in the history of free
institutions. My hope--a distant and yet a sincere hope--is that the
American people may, in spite of all difficulties, be awakened to a
realization of that folly and restore the Constitution to its traditional
dignity by a repeal, sooner or later, of the monstrous Amendment by
which it has been defaced.
CHAPTER III
DESTROYING OUR FEDERAL SYSTEM
THUS far I have been dealing with the wrong which the Prohibition
Amendment commits against the vital principle of any national
Constitution, the principle which alone justifies the idea of a
Constitution--a body of organic law removed from the operation of the
ordinary processes of popular rule and representative government. But
reference was made at the outset to a wrong of a more special, yet
equally profound, character. The distinctive feature of our system of
government is that it combines a high degree of power and
independence in the several States with a high degree of power and
authority in the national government. Time was when the dispute
naturally arising in such a Federal Union, concerning the line of
division between these two kinds of power, turned on an abstract or
legalistic question of State sovereignty. That abstract question was
decided, once for all, by the arbitrament of arms in our great Civil War.
But the decision, while it strengthened the foundations of the Federal
Union, left unimpaired the individuality, the vitality, the
self-dependence of the States in all the ordinary affairs of life. It

continued to be true, after the war as before, that each State had its own
local pride, developed its own special institutions, regulated the
conduct of life within its boundaries according to its own views of what
was conducive to the order, the well-being, the contentment, the
progress, of its own people. It has been the belief of practically all
intelligent observers of our national life that this individuality and
self-dependence of the States has been a cardinal element in the
promotion of our national welfare and in the preservation of our
national character. In a country of such vast extent and natural variety,
a country developing with unparalleled rapidity and confronted with
constantly changing conditions, who can say how great would have
been the loss to local initiative and civic spirit, how grave the
impairment of national concord and good will, if all the serious
concerns of the American people had been settled for them by a central
government at Washington ? In that admirable little book, "Politics for
Young Americans," Charles Nordhoff fifty years ago expounded in
simple language the principles underlying our system of government.
Coming to the subject of "Decentralization," he said:
Experience has shown that this device [decentralization] is of extreme
importance, for two reasons: First, it is a powerful and the best means
of training a people to efficient political action and the art of
self-government; and, second, it presents constant and important
barriers to the encroachment of rulers upon the rights and liberties of
the nation; every subdivision forming a stronghold of resistance by the
people against unjust or wicked rulers. Take notice that any system of
government is excellent in the precise degree in which it naturally
trains the people in political independence, and habituates them to take
an active part in governing themselves. Whatever plan of government
does this is good--no matter what it may be called; and that which
avoids this is necessarily bad.
What Mr. Nordhoff thus set forth has been universally acknowledged
as the cardinal merit of local self-government; and in addition to this
cardinal merit it has been recognized by all competent students of our