decide whether he too will condone and even abet such disregard of
law, or whether he will set his face firmly against such a course.

It is safe to say that there has never been a time in the history of
our country when the President of a great university could have found
it necessary to address the young Americans before him in any such
language. There has never been a time when deliberate disregard of law
was habitual among the classes which represent culture, achievement,
and wealth--the classes among whom respect for law is usually
regarded as constant and instinctive. That such disregard now prevails
is an assertion for which President Angell did not find it necessary
to point to any evidence. It is universally admitted. Friends of
Prohibition and enemies of Prohibition, at odds on everything else,
are in entire agreement upon this. It is high time that thinking
people went beyond the mere recognition of this fact and entered into
a serious examination of the cause to which it is to be ascribed.
Perhaps I should say the causes, for of course more causes than one
enter into the matter. But I say the cause, for the reason that there
is one cause which transcends all others, both in underlying
importance and in the permanence of its nature. That cause does not
reside in any special extravagances that there may be in the Volstead
act. The cardinal grievance against which the unprecedented contempt
for law among high-minded and law-abiding people is directed is not
the Volstead act but the Eighteenth Amendment. The enactment of that
Amendment was a monstrosity so gross that no thinking American thirty
years ago would have regarded it as a possibility. It is not only a
crime against the Constitution of the United States, and not only a
crime against the whole spirit of our Federal system, but a crime
against the first principles of rational government. The object of the
Constitution of the United States is to imbed in the organic law of