PROHIBITION as a legislative method to regulate and con trol the liquor traffic has such varied and extended application as to make its other uses in legal terminology of minor consequence. It was, when nationally adopted, no new principle, but one that had been used for more than 75 years in State and local option laws in the United States and other countries. This legislation re viewed in the article LIQUOR LAWS (q.v.) furnishes the necessary background for understanding national prohibition. Beginning in 1920, however, under the i8th amendment to the Constitution, the United States applied prohibition on a national scale over an area and to a population so large and complex in its climatic, economic and racial characteristics that it became by common consent the greatest social experiment of modern times.
National prohibition was adopted as the logical result of a long experience with State and local prohibition and not without anticipation of the difficulties it would encounter. The amend ment cannot truthfully be said to have been "put over" by any fanatical minority. It was adopted after full and free public dis cussion, in the face of determined and powerful opposition, by larger majorities and greater unanimity in Congress and in the States (out of a total of 48 States) which ratified it than any other amendment. The official statistics (Statistics Concerning Intoxicating Liquors, Feb. 1929, Washington, Treasury Depart ment) gave the recorded ratification vote in the State senates of 46 States as 1,310 or 84.6% for ratification to 237 against, and the total house vote (the lower and more popular branch of the State legislatures) 3,782 or 78.5% for ratification to 1,035 against. Yet it is a fact that no great question of public policy since the slavery issue of pre-Civil War days aroused more controversy among the people of the United States than national prohibition after its adoption. Well considered public opinion about prohibition and its effectiveness, and what was to be done about it, cut deeper across the lines of political parties, churches, families, rural and urban communities than any other question of the generation.
and again We talk of law enforcement. You cannot enforce conflicting laws —something must give way ; and, when it is the i8th amendment and the legislate on based upon it on the one hand and the whole body of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the whole of political English and American History, on the other, which do you suppose will have to give way ? It must be this new and invading element in our public law.
In general this position represented the strongest indictment of the 18th amendment and the National Prohibition Act with its supporting legislation, administrative regulations and orders. It was intelligently presented on high moral grounds and while neces sarily representing what was at first a very small minority of those who had any effective influence on public opinion, it might have had greater potentiality for leadership -old an increasing number of adherents if it had not been for the fact that it seemed to many to savour of greater concern for "the Ark of the Covenant" as a sacred heritage than for the economic facts that underlay pub lic morals as well as the effectiveness of the Constitution and the government it set up to deal with the social problems of modern democracy.