Amendment is not merely an impairment of the principle of
self-government of the States; it constitutes an absolute abandonment
of that principle. This does not mean, of course, an immediate
abandonment of the practice of State self-government; established
institutions have a tenacious life, and moreover there are a thousand
practical advantages in State selfgovernment which nobody will think
of giving up. But the principle, I repeat, is abandoned altogether if
we accept the Eighteenth Amendment as right and proper; and if anybody
imagines that the abandonment of the principle is of no practical
consequence, he is woefully deluded. So long as the principle is held
in esteem, it is always possible to make a stout fight against any
particular encroachment upon State authority; any proposed
encroachment must prove its claim to acceptance not only as a
practical desideratum but as not too flagrant an invasion of State
prerogatives. But with the Eighteenth Amendment accepted as a proper
part of our system, it will be impossible to object to any invasion as
more flagrant than that to which the nation has already given its
approval. A striking illustration of this has, curiously enough, been
furnished in the brief time that has passed since the adoption or the
eighteenth Amendment. Southern Senators and Representatives and
Legislaturemen who, for getting all about their cherished doctrine of
State rights, had fallen over themselves in their eagerness to fasten
the Eighteenth Amendment upon the country, suddenly discovered that
they were deeply devoted to that doctrine when the Nineteenth
Amendment came up for consideration. But nobody would listen to them.
They professed--and doubtless some of them sincerely professed--to
find an essential difference between putting Woman Suffrage into the
Constitution and putting Prohibition into the Constitution. The
determination of the right of suffrage was, they said, the most
fundamental attribute of a sovereign State; national Prohibition did