elections, while the actual incorporation of Prohibition in the
Constitution settles the matter once for all--has been deprived of all
its force by our actual experience. So far from settling the matter
once for all, the Eighteenth Amendment has been a frightful breeder of
unsettlement and contention, which bids fair to continue indefinitely.

I have offered this suggestion for what it may be worth as a practical
proposal; it seems certainly deserving of discussion, and I could not
refrain from putting it forward as a possible means of relief from an
intolerable situation. But I do not wish to wind up on that note. The
right solution--a solution incomparably better than this which I have
suggested on account of its apparently better chance of acceptance--is
the outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. And moreover, the
primary need of this moment is not so much any practical proposal
likely to be quickly realized as the awakening of the public mind to
the fundamental issues of the case --the essential principles of law,
of government, and of individual life which are so flagrantly sinned
against by the Prohibition Amendment.

To the exposition of those fundamental issues this little book has
been almost exclusively confined. It has left untouched a score of
aspects of the question of drink, and of the prohibition of drink,
which it would have been interesting to discuss, and the discussion of
which would, I feel sure, have added to the strength of the argument I
have endeavored to present. But there is an advantage, too, in keeping
to the high points. It is not to a multiplicity of details that one
must trust in a case like this. What is needed above all is a clear
and wholehearted recognition of fundamentals. And I do not believe
that the American people have got so far away from their fundamentals
that such recognition will be denied when the case is clearly put