If laws regulating the ordinary personal conduct of individuals are to be entrenched in this way, one of the first conditions of respect for law necessarily falls to the ground.  That practical maxim which is always appealed to, and rightly appealed to, in behalf of an unpopular law—­the maxim that if the law is bad the way to get it repealed is to obey it and enforce it—­loses its validity.  If a majority cannot repeal the law—­if it is perfectly conceivable, and even probable, that generation after generation may pass without the will of the majority having a chance to be put into effect—­then it is idle to expect intelligent freemen to bow down in meek submission to its prescriptions.  Apart from the question of distribution of governmental powers, it was until recently a matter of course to say that the purpose of the Constitution was to protect the rights of minorities.  That it might ever be perverted to exactly the opposite purpose—­to the purpose of fastening not only upon minorities but even upon majorities for an unlimited future the will of the majority for the time being—­certainly never crossed the mind of any of the great men who framed the Constitution of the United States.  Yet this is precisely what the Prohibition mania has done.  The safeguards designed to protect freedom against thoughtless or wanton invasion have been seized upon as a means of protecting a denial of freedom against any practical possibility of repeal.  Upon a matter concerning the ordinary practices of daily life, we and our children and our children’s children are deprived of the possibility of taking such action as we think fit unless we can obtain the assent of twothirds of both branches of Congress and the Legislatures of three-fourths of the States.  To live under such a dispensation in such a matter is to live without the first essentials of a government of freemen.  I admit that all this is not clearly in the minds of most of the people who break the law, or who condone or abet the breaking of the law.  Nevertheless it is virtually in their minds.  For, whenever an attempt is made to bring about a substantial change in the Prohibition law, the objection is immediately made that such a change would necessarily amount to a nullification of the Eighteenth Amendment.  And so it would.  People therefore feel in their hearts that they are confronted practically with no other choice but that of either supinely 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 choice of evils; and it is not surprising that many good citizens regard the last of the three choices as the best.  How far this contempt and this disregard has gone is but very imperfectly indicated by the things which were doubtless in President Angell’s mind, and which are in the minds of most persons who