recognized is little to the credit of the American people, and still
less to the credit of the American press and of those who should be
the leaders of public opinion. One circumstance may, however, be cited
which tends to extenuate in some degree this glaring failure of
political sense and judgment. There have long been Prohibition
enactments in many of our State Constitutions, and this has made
familiar and commonplace the idea of Prohibition as part of a
Constitution. But our State Constitutions are not Constitutions in
anything like the same sense as that which attaches to the
Constitution of the United States. Most of our State Constitutions can
be altered with little more difficulty than ordinary laws; the process
merely takes a little more time, and offers no serious obstacle to any
object earnestly desired by a substantial majority of the people of
the State.

Accordingly our State Constitutions are full of a multitude of details
which really belong in the ordinary domain of statute law; and nobody
looks upon them as embodying that fundamental and organic law upon
whose integrity and authority depends the life and safety of our
institutions. The Constitution of the United States, on the other
hand, is a true Constitution--concerned only with fundamentals, and
guarded against change in a manner suited to the preservation of
fundamentals. To put into it a regulation of personal habits, to
buttress such a regulation by its safeguards, is an atrocity for which
no characterization can be too severe. And it is something more than
an atrocity; the Eighteenth Amendment is not only a perversion but
also a degradation of the Constitution. In what precedes, the emphasis
has been placed on the perversion of what was designed as a safeguard
of liberty into a safeguard of the denial of liberty. But even if no
issue of liberty entered into the case, an amendment that embodied a