publicly express their regret over the prevalence of law-breaking.  What they are thinking about, what the Anti-Saloon League talks about, what the Prohibition enforcement officers expend their energy upon, is the sale of alcoholic drinks in public places and by bootleggers.  But where the bootlegger and the restaurant-keeper counts his thousands, home brew counts its tens of thousands.  To this subject there is a remarkable absence of attention on the part of the Anti-Saloon League and of the Prohibition enforcement service.  They know that there are not hundreds of thousands but millions of people breaking the law by making their own liquors, but they dare not speak of it.  They dare not go even so far as to make it universally known that the making of home brew is a violation of the law.  To this day a very considerable number of people who indulge in the practice are unaware that it is a violation of the law.  And the reason for this careful and persistent silence is only too plain.  To make conspicuous before the whole American people the fact that the law is being steadily and complacently violated in millions of decent American homes would bring about a realization of the demoralizing effect of Prohibition which its sponsors, fanatical as they are, very wisely shrink from facing.

How long this demoralization may last I shall not venture to predict.  But it will not be overcome in a day; and it will not be overcome at all by means of exhortations.  It is possible that enforcement will gradually become more and more efficient, and that the spirit of resistance may thus gradually be worn out.  On the other hand it is also possible that means of evading the law may become more and more perfected by invention and otherwise, and that the melancholy and humiliating spectacle which we are now witnessing may be of very long duration.  But in any case it has already lasted long enough to do incalculable and almost ineradicable harm.  And for all this it is utterly idle to place the blame on those qualities of human nature which have led to the violation of the law.  Of those qualities some are reprehensible and some are not only blameless but commendable.  The great guilt is not that of the law-breakers but that of the lawmakers.  It is childish to imagine that every law, no matter what its nature, can command respect.  Nothing would be easier than to imagine laws which a very considerable number of perfectly wellmeaning people would be glad to have enacted, but which if enacted it would be not only the right, but the duty, of sound citizens to ignore.  I do not say that the Eighteenth Amendment falls into this category.  But it comes perilously near to doing so, and thousands of the best American citizens think that it actually does do so.  It has degraded the Constitution of the United States.  It has created a division among the people of the United States comparable only to that which was made by the awful issue of slavery and secession.