soon became clear that the Volstead act was being so terribly discredited by the preposterous spectacle of the Government selling liquor on its own ships that something had to be done about it; and it was only under the pressure of this situation that a new line of strategy was adopted by the Anti-Saloon League.  What it will do if it finds that it cannot put through its plan of excluding liquor from all ships, American and foreign, remains to be seen.  Now it may be replied to all this that a certain amount of laxity is to be found in the execution of all laws; that the resources at the disposal of government not being sufficient to secure the hunting down and punishment of all offenders, our executive and prosecuting officers and police and courts apply their powers in such directions and in such ways as to accomplish the nearest approach possible to a complete enforcement of the law.  But the reply is worthless.  Because the enforcement of all laws is in some degree imperfect, it does not follow that there is no disgrace and no mischief in the spectacle of a law enforced with spectacular vigor, and even violence, in a thousand cases where such enforcement cannot be successfully resisted, and deliberately treated as a dead letter in a hundred thousand cases where its enforcement would show how widespread and intense is the people’s disapproval of the law.  There are many instances in which a law has become a dead letter; where this is generally recognized no appreciable harm is done, since universal custom operates as a virtual repeal.  But here is a case of a law enforced with militant energy where it suits the officers of the Government to enforce it, systematically ignored in millions of cases by the same officers because it suits them to do that, and cynically violated by the direct orders of the Government itself when this course seems recommended by a cold-blooded calculation of policy !  If the laws against larceny, or arson, or burglary, or murder, were executed in this fashion, what standing would the law have in anybody’s mind?  Yet in the case of these crimes, the law only makes effective the moral code which substantially the whole of the community respects as a fundamental part of its ethical creed; and accordingly even if the law were administered in any such outrageous fashion as is the case with Prohibition, it would still retain in large measure its moral authority.

But in the case of the Prohibition law, an enormous minority, and very possibly a majority, of the people regard the thing it forbids as perfectly innocent and, within proper limits, eminently desirable; the only moral sanction that it has in their minds is that of its being on the statute books.  What can that moral sanction possibly amount to when the administration of the law itself furnishes the most notorious of all examples of disrespect for its commands?  There is another aspect of the enforcement of the law which invites comment, but upon which I shall say only a