legislature is driven to the deliberate enactment of a law that flies in the face of a mandate of the Constitution.  A possible plan exists, however, which is not open to this objection, and yet the execution of which would not present such terrific difficulty as would the proposal of a simple repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.  That Amendment imbeds Prohibition in the organic law of the country, and thus not only imposes it upon the individual States regardless of what their desires may be, but takes away from the nation itself the right to legislate upon the subject by the ordinary processes of law-making.  Now an Amendment repealing the Eighteenth Amendment but at the same time conferring upon Congress the power to make laws concerning the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors, would make it possible for Congress to pass a Volstead act, or a beer-and-wine act, or no Liquor act at all, just as its own judgment or desire might dictate.  It would give the Federal Government a power which I think it would be far more wholesome to reserve to the States; but it would get rid of the worst part of the Eighteenth Amendment.  And it would have, I think, an incomparably more favorable reception, from the start, than would a proposal of simple repeal.  For the public could readily be brought to see the reasonableness of giving the nation a chance, through its representatives at Washington, to express its will on the subject from time to time, and the unreasonableness of binding generation after generation to helpless submission.  The plea of majority rule is always a taking one in this country; and it is rarely that that plea rests on stronger ground than it would in this instance.  The one strong argument which might be urged against the proposal—­namely that such a provision would make Prohibition a constant issue in national elections, while the actual incorporation of Prohibition in the Constitution settles the matter once for all—­has been deprived of all its force by our actual experience.  So far from settling the matter once for all, the Eighteenth Amendment has been a frightful breeder of unsettlement and contention, which bids fair to continue indefinitely.

I have offered this suggestion for what it may be worth as a practical proposal; it seems certainly deserving of discussion, and I could not refrain from putting it forward as a possible means of relief from an intolerable situation.  But I do not wish to wind up on that note.  The right solution—­a solution incomparably better than this which I have suggested on account of its apparently better chance of acceptance—­is the outright repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.  And moreover, the primary need of this moment is not so much any practical proposal likely to be quickly realized as the awakening of the public mind to the fundamental issues of the case —­the essential principles of law, of government, and of individual life which are so flagrantly sinned against by the Prohibition Amendment.