personal habits of individuals forms a proper part of the Constitution
of a great nation there is no room whatever for rational difference of
opinion. Whether Prohibition is right or wrong, wise or unwise, all
sides are agreed that it is a denial of personal liberty.
Prohibitionists maintain that the denial is justified, like other
restraints upon personal liberty to which we all assent;
anti-prohibitionists maintain that this denial of personal liberty is
of a vitally different nature from those to which we all assent. That
it is a denial of personal liberty is undisputed; and the point with
which we are at this moment concerned is that to entrench a denial of
liberty behind the mighty ramparts of our Constitution is to do
precisely the opposite of what our Constitution--or any Constitution
like ours--is designed to do. The Constitution withdraws certain
things from the control of the majority for the time being--withdraws
them from the province of ordinary legislation--for the purpose of
safeguarding liberty, the Eighteenth Amendment seizes upon the
mechanism designed for this purpose, and perverts it to the
diametrically opposite end, that of safeguarding the denial of
liberty.

All history teaches that liberty is in danger from the tyranny of
majorities as well as from that of oligarchies and monarchies;
accordingly the Constitution says: No mere majority, no ordinary
legislative procedure, shall be competent to deprive the people of the
liberty that is hereby guaranteed to them. But the Eighteenth
Amendment says: No mere majority, no mere legislative procedure, shall
be competent to restore to the people the liberty that is hereby taken
away from them. Thus, quite apart from all questions as to the merits
of Prohibition in itself, the Eighteenth Amendment is a Constitutional
monstrosity. That this has not been more generally and more keenly