that law or nothing!  I do not say that I favor this procedure; for it would certainly not be an honest fulfilment of the requirements of the Eighteenth Amendment.  To have a law which professes to carry out an injunction of the Constitution but which does not do so is a thing to be deplored.  But is it more to be deplored than to have a law which in its terms does carry out the injunction of the Constitution but which in its actual operation does no such thing?  A law to the violation of which in a vast class of instances—­the millions of instances of home brew—­the Government deliberately shuts its eyes?  A law the violation of which in the class of instances in which the Government does seriously undertake to enforce it—­bootlegging, smuggling and moonshining—­is condoned, aided and abetted by hundreds of thousands of our best citizens?  It is, as I have said in an early chapter, a choice of evils; and it is not easy to decide between them.  On the one hand, we have the disrespect of the Constitution involved in the enactment by Congress of a law which it knows to be less than a fulfilment of the Constitution’s mandate.  On the other hand we have the disrespect of the law involved in its daily violation by millions of citizens who break it without the slightest compunction or sense of guilt, and in the deliberate failure of the Government to so much as take cognizance of the most numerous class of those violations.  In favor of the former course—­the passing of a wine-and-beer law—­it may at least be said that the offense, whether it be great or small, is committed once for all by a single action of Congress, which, if left undisturbed, would probably before long be generally accepted as taking the place of the Amendment itself.  A law permitting wine and beer but forbidding stronger drinks would have so much more public sentiment behind it than the present law that it would probably be decently enforced, and not very widely resisted; and though such a law would be justly objected to as not an honest fulfilment of the Eighteenth Amendment, it would, I believe, in its practical effect, be far less demoralizing than the existing statute, the Volstead act.  Accordingly, while I cannot view the enactment of such a law with unalloyed satisfaction, I think that, in the situation into which we have been put by the Eighteenth Amendment, the proposal of a wine-and-beer law to displace the Volstead law deserves the support of good citizens as a practical measure which would effect a great improvement on the present state of things.

CHAPTER X

Prohibitionand socialism