few words.  I refer to the many invasions of privacy, unwarranted searches, etc., that have taken place in the execution of the law.  I f this went on upon a much larger scale than has actually been the case, it would justly be the occasion for perhaps the most severe of all the indictments against the Volstead act; for it would mean that Americans are being habituated to indifference in regard to the violation of one of their most ancient and most essential rights.

But in fact the danger of public resentment over such a course has been the chief cause of the sagacious strategy which has characterized the policy of the Government; or perhaps one should rather say, the Anti-Saloon League, for it is the League, and not the Government, that is the predominant partner in this matter.  For the present, the League has been “lying low” in the matter of search and seizure; but if it should ever feel strong enough to undertake the suppression of home brew, there is not the faintest question but that it will press forward the most stringent conceivable measures of search and seizure.  Accordingly, there opens up before the eyes of the American people this pleasing prospect:  If the present struggle of the League (or the Government) with bootleggers and moonshiners and smugglers is brought to a successful conclusion, there will naturally be a greater resort than ever to home manufacture; and equally naturally, it will then be necessary for the League (or the Government) to undertake to stamp out that practice.  But obviously this cannot be done without inaugurating a sweeping and determined policy of search and seizure in private houses; a beautiful prospect for “the land of the free,” for the inheritors of the English tradition of individual liberty and of the American spirit of ’76—­sight for gods and men to weep over or laugh at!

CHAPTER VII

Nature of the prohibitionist tyranny

That there are some things which, however good they may be in themselves, the majority has no right to impose upon the minority, is a doctrine that was, I think I may say, universally understood among thinking Americans of all former generations.  It was often forgotten by the unthinking; but those who felt themselves called upon to be serious instructors of public opinion were always to be counted on to assert it, in the face of any popular clamor or aberration.  The most deplorable feature, to my mind, of the whole story of the Prohibition amendment, was the failure of our journalists and leaders of opinion, with a few notable exceptions, to perform this duty which so peculiarly devolves upon them.  Lest any reader should imagine that this doctrine of the proper limits of majority power is something peculiar to certain political theorists, I will quote just one authority —­where I might quote scores as well—­to which it is impossible to apply any such characterization.  It ought, of course, to be unnecessary to quote any authority, since the Constitution itself contains the clearest possible embodiment of that doctrine.  In the excellent little book of half a century ago referred to in a previous chapter, Nordhoff’s “Politics for Young Americans,” the chapter entitled “Of Political Constitutions” opens as follows: