Amendment--would, in my judgment, be an improvement on the present
state of things. But it is not pleasant to contemplate a situation in
which, to avoid something still worse, the national legislature is
driven to the deliberate enactment of a law that flies in the face of
a mandate of the Constitution. A possible plan exists, however, which
is not open to this objection, and yet the execution of which would
not present such terrific difficulty as would the proposal of a simple
repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. That Amendment imbeds Prohibition
in the organic law of the country, and thus not only imposes it upon
the individual States regardless of what their desires may be, but
takes away from the nation itself the right to legislate upon the
subject by the ordinary processes of law-making. Now an Amendment
repealing the Eighteenth Amendment but at the same time conferring
upon Congress the power to make laws concerning the manufacture, sale
and transportation of intoxicating liquors, would make it possible for
Congress to pass a Volstead act, or a beer-and-wine act, or no Liquor
act at all, just as its own judgment or desire might dictate. It would
give the Federal Government a power which I think it would be far more
wholesome to reserve to the States; but it would get rid of the worst
part of the Eighteenth Amendment. And it would have, I think, an
incomparably more favorable reception, from the start, than would a
proposal of simple repeal. For the public could readily be brought to
see the reasonableness of giving the nation a chance, through its
representatives at Washington, to express its will on the subject from
time to time, and the unreasonableness of binding generation after
generation to helpless submission. The plea of majority rule is always
a taking one in this country; and it is rarely that that plea rests on
stronger ground than it would in this instance. The one strong
argument which might be urged against the proposal--namely that such a
provision would make Prohibition a constant issue in national