CHAPTER II

Creating A nation of law-breakers

In his baccalaureate address as President of Yale University, in June, 1922, Dr. Angell felt called upon to say that in this country “the violation of law has never been so general nor so widely condoned as at present,” and to add these impressive words of appeal to the young graduates: 

This is a fact which strikes at the very heart of our system of government, and the young man entering upon his active career must decide whether he too will condone and even abet such disregard of law, or whether he will set his face firmly against such a course.

It is safe to say that there has never been a time in the history of our country when the President of a great university could have found it necessary to address the young Americans before him in any such language.  There has never 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.