Day after day, month after month, a distressing, a disgusting spectacle is presented to the American people in connection with the enforcement of the national Prohibition law.  No day passes without newspaper headlines which “feature” some phase of the contest going on between the Government on the one hand and millions of citizens on the other; citizens who belong not to the criminal or semi-criminal classes, nor yet to the ranks of those who are indifferent or disloyal to the principles of our institutions, but who are typical Americans, decent, industrious, patriotic, law-abiding.  It is true that the individuals whom the Government hunts down by its spies, its arrests, its prosecutions, are men who make a business of breaking the Prohibition law, and most of whom would probably just as readily break other laws if money was to be made by it.  But none the less the real struggle is not with the thousands who furnish liquor but with the hundreds of thousands, or millions, to whom they purvey it.  Every time we read of a spectacular raid or a sensational capture, we are really reading of a war that is being waged by a vast multitude of good normal American citizens against the enforcement of a law which they regard as a gross invasion of their rights and a violation of the first principles of American government.  The state of things thus arising was admirably and compactly characterized by Justice Clarke, of the United States Supreme Court, in a single sentence of his recent address before the Alumni of the New York University Law School, as follows: 

The Eighteenth Amendment required millions of men and women to abruptly give up habits and customs of life which they thought not immoral or wrong, but which, on the contrary, they believed to be necessary to their reasonable comfort and happiness, and thereby, as we all now see, respect not only for that law, but for all law, has been put to an unprecedented and demoralizing strain in our country, the end of which it is difficult to see.

Upon all this, however, as concerned with the conduct of the people at large, perhaps enough has been said in previous chapters.  What I wish to dwell upon at this point is the conduct of those who, either in the Government itself, or in the power behind the Government—­the Anti-Saloon League—­are carrying on the enforcement of the Prohibition law.  They are not carrying it on in the way in which the enforcement of other laws is carried on.  In the case of a normal criminal law—­and it must always be remembered that the Volstead act is a criminal law, just like the laws against burglary, or forgery, or arson—­those who are responsible for its enforcement regard themselves as administrators of the law, neither more nor less.  But the enforcement of the Prohibition law is something quite different:  it is not a work of administration but of strategy; not a question of seeing that the law is obeyed by everybody, but of carrying on a campaign against the