or the time being--withdraws
them from the province of ordinary legislation--for the purpose of
safeguarding liberty, the Eighteenth Amendment seizes upon the
mechanism designed for this purpose, and perverts it to the
diametrically opposite end, that of safeguarding the denial of
liberty.

All history teaches that liberty is in danger from the tyranny of
majorities as well as from that of oligarchies and monarchies;
accordingly the Constitution says: No mere majority, no ordinary
legislative procedure, shall be competent to deprive the people of the
liberty that is hereby guaranteed to them. But the Eighteenth
Amendment says: No mere majority, no mere legislative procedure, shall
be competent to restore to the people the liberty that is hereby taken
away from them. Thus, quite apart from all questions as to the merits
of Prohibition in itself, the Eighteenth Amendment is a Constitutional
monstrosity. That this has not been more generally and more keenly
recognized is little to the credit of the American people, and still
less to the credit of the American press and of those who should be
the leaders of public opinion. One circumstance may, however, be cited
which tends to extenuate in some degree this glaring failure of
political sense and judgment. There have long been Prohibition
enactments in many of our State Constitutions, and this has made
familiar and commonplace the idea of Prohibition as part of a
Constitution. But our State Constitutions are not Constitutions in
anything like the same sense as that which attaches to the
Constitution of the United States. Most of our State Constitutions can
be altered with little more difficulty than ordinary laws; the process
merely takes a little more time, and offers no serious obstacle to any
object earnestly desired by a substantial majority of the people of
the State.

Accordingly our State Constitutions are full of a multitude of details
which really belong in the ordinary domain of statute law; and nobody
looks upon them as embodying that fundamental and organic law upon
whose integrity and authority depends the life and safety of our
institutions. The Constitution of the United States, on the other
hand, is a true Constitution--concerned only with fundamentals, and
guarded against change in a manner suited to the preservation of
fundamentals. To put into it a regulation of personal habits, to
buttress such a regulation by its safeguards, is an atrocity for which
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