no small measure to the support of great capitalists and
industrialists bent upon the absorbing object of productive
efficiency; but they have paid a price they little realize. For in the
attainment of this minor object, they have made a tremendous breach in
the greatest defense of the existing order of society against the
advancing enemy. To undermine the foundations of Liberty is to open
the way to Socialism.

CHAPTER XI

IS THERE ANY WAY OUT?

IN the second chapter of this book, I undertook to give an account of
the state of mind which the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment has
created, and which is at the bottom of that contempt for the law whose
widespread prevalence among the best elements of our population is
acknowledged alike by prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists.
"People feel in their hearts," I said, "that they are confronted with
no other choice but that of either 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 deplorable choice of evils; a state of things which
it is hardly too much to call appalling in its potentialities of civic
demoralization.

And one who realizes the gravity of the injury that a long continuance
of this situation will inevitably inflict upon our institutions and
our national character must ask whether there is any practical
possibility of escape from it. The right means, and the only entirely
satisfactory means, of escape from it is through the undoing of the
error which brought it about--that is, through the repeal of the
Eighteenth Amendment. Towards that end many earnest and patriotic
citizens are working; but of course they realize the stupendous
difficulty of the task they have undertaken. As a rule, these men,
while working for the distant goal of repeal of the Amendment, are
seeking to substitute for the Volstead act a law which will permit the
manufacture and sale of beer and light wines; a plan which, as I have
elsewhere stated, while by no means free from grave objection--for it
is clearly not in keeping with the intent of the Eighteenth
Amendment--would, in my judgment, be an improvement on the present
state of things. But it is not pleasant to contemplate a situation in
which, to avoid something still worse,