before them. There is one and only one thing that could justify such a
violation of liberty and of the cardinal principles of rational
government as is embodied in the Eighteenth Amendment. In the face of
desperate necessity, there may be justification for the most desperate
remedy.

But so far from this being a case of desperate necessity, nothing is
more unanimously acknowledged by all except those who labor under an
obsession, than that the evil of drink has been steadily diminishing.
Not only during the period of Prohibition agitation, but for many
decades before that, drunkenness had been rapidly declining, and both
temperate drinking and total abstinence correspondingly increasing. It
is unnecessary to appeal to statistics. The familiar experience of
every man whose memory runs back twenty, or forty, or sixty years, is
sufficient to put the case beyond question; and every species of
literary and historical record confirms the conclusion. This violent
assault upon liberty, this crude defiance of the most settled
principles of lawmaking and of government, this division of the
country--as it has been well expressed--into the hunters and the
hunted, this sowing of dragons' teeth in the shape of lawlessness and
contempt for law, has not been the dictate of imperious necessity, but
the indulgence of the crude desire of a highly organized but one-idead
minority to impose its standards of conduct upon all of the American
people. To shake off this tyranny is one of the worthiest objects to
which good Americans can devote themselves. To shake it off would mean
not only to regain what has been lost by this particular enactment,
but to forefend the infliction of similar outrages in the future. If
it is allowed to stand, there is no telling in what quarter the next
invasion of liberty will be made by fanatics possessed with the itch
for perfection. I am not thinking of tobacco, or anything of the kind;