stionably,
advantage was taken of this situation, there can be little doubt that
the Eighteenth Amendment would have had much harder sledding at a
normal time. And it is right, accordingly, to insist that the
Amendment was not subjected to the kind of discussion, nor put through
the kind of test of national approval, which ought to precede any such
permanent and radical change in our Constitutional organization. This
is especially true because National Prohibition was not even remotely
an issue in the preceding election, nor in any earlier one. All these
things must weigh in our judgment of the moral weight to be attached
to the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment; but there is another
aspect of that adoption which is more important. The gravest reproach
which attaches to that unfortunate act, the one which causes deepest
concern among thinking citizens, does not relate to any incidental
feature of the Prohibition manoevres. The fundamental trouble lay in a
deplorable absence of any general understanding of the seriousness of
making a vital change in the Constitution--incomparably the most vital
to which it has ever been subjected--and of the solemn responsibility
of those upon whom rested the decision to make or not to make that
change. Even in newspapers in which one would expect, as a matter of
course, that this aspect of the question would be earnestly impressed
upon their readers, it was, as a rule, passed over without so much as
a mention. And this is not all. One of the shrewdest and most
successful of the devices which the League and its supporters
constantly made use of was to represent the function of Congress as
being merely that of submitting the question to the State
Legislatures; as though the passage of the Amendment by a two-thirds
vote of Congress did not necessarily imply approval, but only a
willingness to let the sentiment of the several States decide. Of
course, such a view is preposterous; of course, if such were the
purpose of the Constitutional procedure there would be no requirement
of a two-thirds vote.* But many members of Congress were glad enough
to take refuge behind this view of their duty, absurd though it was;
and no one can say how large a part it played in securing the
requisite two-thirds of House and Senate. Yet from the moment the
Amendment was thus adopted by Congress, nothing more was heard of this
notion of that body having performed the merely ministerial act of
passing the que