t I do not wish to wind up on that note. The
right solution--a solution incomparably better than this which I have
suggested on account of its apparently better chance of acceptance--is
the outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. And moreover, the
primary need of this moment is not so much any practical proposal
likely to be quickly realized as the awakening of the public mind to
the fundamental issues of the case --the essential principles of law,
of government, and of individual life which are so flagrantly sinned
against by the Prohibition Amendment.

To the exposition of those fundamental issues this little book has
been almost exclusively confined. It has left untouched a score of
aspects of the question of drink, and of the prohibition of drink,
which it would have been interesting to discuss, and the discussion of
which would, I feel sure, have added to the strength of the argument I
have endeavored to present. But there is an advantage, too, in keeping
to the high points. It is not to a multiplicity of details that one
must trust in a case like this. What is needed above all is a clear
and wholehearted recognition of fundamentals. And I do not believe
that the American people have got so far away from their fundamentals
that such recognition will be denied when the case is clearly put
before them. There is one and only one thing that could justify such a
violation of liberty and of the cardinal principles of rational
government as is embodied in the Eighteenth Amendment. In the face of
desperate necessity, there may be justification for the most desperate
remedy.

But so far from this being a case of desperate necessity, nothing is
more unanimously acknowledged by all except those who labor under an
obsession, than that the evil of drink has been steadily diminishing.
Not only during the period of Prohibition agitation, but for many
decades before that, drunkenness had been rapidly declining, and both
temperate drinking and total abstinence correspondingly increasing. It
is unnecessary to appeal to statistics. The familiar experience of
every man whose memory runs back twenty, or forty, or sixty years, is
sufficient to put the case beyond question; and every species of
literary and historical record confirms the conclusion. This violent
assault upon liberty, this crude defiance of the most settled
principles of lawmaking and of government, this division of the
country--as it has been well expressed--into