What Prohibition Has Done to America | Page 7

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 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