<SPAN name="chap11"></SPAN>
<h2>CHAPTER XI </h2>
<h2>IS THERE ANY WAY OUT? </h2>
<p>IN the second chapter of this book, I undertook to give an account of the
state of mind which the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment has created,
and which is at the bottom of that contempt for the law whose widespread
prevalence among the best elements of our population is acknowledged alike
by prohibitionists and anti-prohibitionists. "People feel in their
hearts," I said, "that they are confronted with no other choice
but that of either submitting to the full rigor of Prohibition, of trying
to procure a law which nullifies the Constitution, or of expressing their
resentment against an outrage on the first principles of the Constitution
by contemptuous disregard of the law." It is a deplorable choice of
evils; a state of things which it is hardly too much to call appalling
in its potentialities of civic demoralization.</p>
<p>And one who realizes the gravity of the injury that a long continuance
of this situation will inevitably inflict upon our institutions and our
national character must ask whether there is any practical possibility
of escape from it. The right means, and the only entirely satisfactory
means, of escape from it is through the undoing of the error which brought
it about--that is, through the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. Towards
that end many earnest and patriotic citizens are working; but of course
they realize the stupendous difficulty of the task they have undertaken.
As a rule, these men, while working for the distant goal of repeal of the
Amendment, are seeking to substitute for the Volstead act a law which will
permit the manufacture and sale of beer and light wines; a plan which,
as I have elsewhere stated, while by no means free from grave objection--for
it is clearly not in keeping with the intent of the Eighteenth Amendment--would,
in my judgment, be an improvement on the present state of things. But it
is not pleasant to contemplate a situation in which, to avoid something
still worse, the national legislature is driven to the deliberate enactment
of a law that flies in the face of a mandate of the Constitution. A possible
plan exists, however, which is not open to this objection, and yet the
execution of which would not present such terrific difficulty as would
the proposal of a simple repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. That Amendment
imbeds Prohibition in the organic law of the country, and thus not only
imposes it upon the individual States regardless of what their desires
may be, but takes away from the nation itself the right to legislate upon
the subject by the ordinary processes of law-making. Now an Amendment repealing
the Eighteenth Amendment but at the same time conferring upon Congress
the power to make laws concerning the manufacture, sale and transportation
of intoxicating liquors, would make it possible for Congress to pass a
Volstead act, or a beer-and-wine act, or no Liquor act at all, just as
its own judgment or desire might dictate. It would give the Federal Government
a power which I think it would be far more wholesome to reserve to the
States; but it would get rid of the worst part of the Eighteenth Amendment.
And it would have, I think, an incomparably more favorable reception, from
the start, than would a proposal of simple repeal. For the public could
readily be brought to see the reasonableness of giving the nation a chance,
through its representatives at Washington, to express its will on the subject
from time to time, and the unreasonableness of binding generation after
generation to helpless submission. The plea of majority rule is always
a taking one in this country; and it is rarely that that plea rests on
stronger ground than it would in this instance. The one strong argument
which might be urged against the proposal--namely that such a provision
would make Prohibition a constant issue in national elections, while the
actual incorporation of Prohibition in the Constitution settles the matter
once for all--has been deprived of all its force by our actual experience.
So far from settling the matter once for all, the Eighteenth Amendment
has been a frightful breeder of unsettlement and contention, which bids
fair to continue indefinitely.</p>
<p>I have offered this suggestion for what it may be worth as a practical
proposal; it seems certainly deserving of discussion, and I could not refrain
from putting it forward as a possible means of relief from an intolerable
situation. But 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 the hunters and the
hunted, this sowing of dragons' teeth in the shape of lawlessness and contempt
for law, has not been the dictate of imperious necessity, but the indulgence
of the crude desire of a highly organized but one-idead minority to impose
its standards of conduct upon all of the American people. To shake off
this tyranny is one of the worthiest objects to which good Americans can
devote themselves. To shake it off would mean not only to regain what has
been lost by this particular enactment, but to forefend the infliction
of similar outrages in the future. If it is allowed to stand, there is
no telling in what quarter the next invasion of liberty will be made by
fanatics possessed with the itch for perfection. I am not thinking of tobacco,
or anything of the kind; twenty years from now, or fifty years from now,
it may be religion, or some other domain of life which at the present moment
seems free from the danger of attack. The time to call a halt is now; and
the way to call a halt is to win back the ground that has already been
lost. To do that will be a splendid victory for all that we used to think
of as American--for liberty, for individuality, for the freedom of each
man to conduct his own life in his own way so long as he does not violate
the rights of others, for the responsibility of each man for the evils
he brings upon himself by the abuse of that freedom. May the day be not
far distant when we shall once more be a nation of sturdy freemen--not
kept from mischief to ourselves by a paternal law copper-fastened in the
Constitution, not watched like children by a host of guardians and spies
and informers, but upstanding Americans loyally obedient to the Constitution,
because living under a Constitution which a people of manly freemen can
wholeheartedly respect and cherish.</p>
<p>THE END<br/></p>
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