er been a time when deliberate disregard of law
was habitual among the classes which represent culture, achievement,
and wealth--the classes among whom respect for law is usually
regarded as constant and instinctive. That such disregard now prevails
is an assertion for which President Angell did not find it necessary
to point to any evidence. It is universally admitted. Friends of
Prohibition and enemies of Prohibition, at odds on everything else,
are in entire agreement upon this. It is high time that thinking
people went beyond the mere recognition of this fact and entered into
a serious examination of the cause to which it is to be ascribed.
Perhaps I should say the causes, for of course more causes than one
enter into the matter. But I say the cause, for the reason that there
is one cause which transcends all others, both in underlying
importance and in the permanence of its nature. That cause does not
reside in any special extravagances that there may be in the Volstead
act. The cardinal grievance against which the unprecedented contempt
for law among high-minded and law-abiding people is directed is not
the Volstead act but the Eighteenth Amendment. The enactment of that
Amendment was a monstrosity so gross that no thinking American thirty
years ago would have regarded it as a possibility. It is not only a
crime against the Constitution of the United States, and not only a
crime against the whole spirit of our Federal system, but a crime
against the first principles of rational government. The object of the
Constitution of the United States is to imbed in the organic law of
the country certain principles, and certain arrangements for the
distribution of power, which shall be binding in a peculiar way upon
generation after generation of the American people. Once so imbedded,
it may prove to be impossible by anything short of a revolution to get
them out, even though a very great majority of the people should
desire to do so.

If laws regulating the ordinary personal conduct of individuals are to
be entrenched in this way, one of the first conditions of respect for
law necessarily falls to the ground. That practical maxim which is
always appealed to, and rightly appealed to, in behalf of an unpopular
law--the maxim that if the law is bad the way to get it repealed is to
obey it and enforce it--loses its validity. If a majority cannot
repeal the law--if it is perfectly conceivable, and even probable,
that generation