enforced with militant energy where it suits the officers of the
Government to enforce it, systematically ignored in millions of cases
by the same officers because it suits them to do that, and cynically
violated by the direct orders of the Government itself when this
course seems recommended by a cold-blooded calculation of policy ! If
the laws against larceny, or arson, or burglary, or murder, were
executed in this fashion, what standing would the law have in
anybody's mind? Yet in the case of these crimes, the law only makes
effective the moral code which substantially the whole of the
community respects as a fundamental part of its ethical creed; and
accordingly even if the law were administered in any such outrageous
fashion as is the case with Prohibition, it would still retain in
large measure its moral authority.

But in the case of the Prohibition law, an enormous minority, and very
possibly a majority, of the people regard the thing it forbids as
perfectly innocent and, within proper limits, eminently desirable; the
only moral sanction that it has in their minds is that of its being on
the statute books. What can that moral sanction possibly amount to
when the administration of the law itself furnishes the most notorious
of all examples of disrespect for its commands? There is another
aspect of the enforcement of the law which invites comment, but upon
which I shall say only a 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.