of this notion of that body having performed the merely ministerial act of passing the question on to the Legislatures.  On the contrary, the two-thirds vote (and more) was pointed to as conclusive evidence of the overwhelming support of the Amendment by the nation; the Legislatures were expected to get with alacrity into the band-wagon into which Congress had so eagerly climbed.  Evidently, it would have been far more difficult to get the Eighteenth Amendment into the Constitution if the two-thirds vote of Congress had been the sole requirement for its adoption.  Congressmen disposed to take their responsibility lightly, and yet not altogether without conscience, voted with the feeling that their act was not final, when they might otherwise have shrunk from doing what their Judgment told them was wrong; and, the thing once through Congress, Legislatures hastened to ratify in the feeling that ratification by the requisite number of Legislatures was manifestly a foregone conclusion.  Thus at no stage of the game was there given to this tremendous Constitutional departure anything even distantly approaching the kind of consideration that such a step demands.  The country was jockeyed and stampeded into the folly it has committed; and who can say what may be the next folly into which we shall fall, if we do not awaken to a truer sense of the duty that rests upon every member of a lawmaking body—­to decide these grave questions in accordance with the dictates of his own honest and intelligent judgment?

* This should be self-evident; but if there were any room for doubt. it would be removed by a reference to the language of Article V of the Constitution:  “The Congress, whenever two-thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution” which shall be valid “when ratified by the Legislatures of three-fourths of the States.”  Thus Congress does not submit an amendment, but proposes it; and it does this only when two-thirds of both Houses deem it necessary.  The primary act of judgment is performed by Congress; what remains for the Legislatures is to ratify or not to ratify that act.

CHAPTER V

The law makers and the law

Well meaning exhorters, shocked at the spectacle of millions of perfectly decent and law-abiding Americans showing an utter disregard of the Prohibition law, are prone to insist that to violate this law, or to abet its violation, is just as immoral as to violate any other criminal law.  The thing is on the statute-books—­nay, in the very Constitution itself —­and to offend against it, they say, is as much a crime as to commit larceny, arson or murder.  But they may repeat this doctrine until Doomsday, and make little impression upon persons who exercise their common sense.  The law that makes larceny, arson or murder a crime merely registers, and emphasizes, and makes