THE LAW ENFORCERS AND THE LAW

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