lmeaning 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,