But what remedy does he suggest, beyond appointing the inevitable investigating committee which, according to the custom of such bodies, will probably sit for from one to five years, publish a voluminous report, with perhaps one or two dissenting reports, and be discharged with thanks? The only recommendation he can offer is to say that “if citizens do not like a law, their duty as honest men and women is to discourage its violation; their right is openly to work for its repeal.” Obviously, from the context in which these passages are found, Mr. Hoover was thinking mainly of the Eighteenth Amendment, but as he rightly points out, and as we cannot[Pg 123] too strongly stress, the whole observance of law hangs together. A loose administration which would allow officials to pick and choose among the laws they enforce, or citizens to determine at will which laws they obey, could only be destructive of any real sense of law on the part of the public. The American problem, though complicated by Prohibition, lies far deeper; and it is the lack of understanding as to what the problem is that so greatly diminishes the force of Mr. Hoover’s appeal to us as citizens anxious to do our duty toward society. II It is needless to waste words in painting the situation in our country to-day. The headlines of any metropolitan newspaper any day do so only too clearly. Crime of the most desperate sort is so rampant that unless a robbery runs into six figures or a murder is outstandingly brutal or intriguing, we no longer even read below the headings. We are no more interested than in a stock that does not move. We have ceased to expect criminals to be caught and punished. We accept the statement from the Chief Justice of the United States that our criminal justice is a disgrace to civilization with the same lack of reaction with which we accept the Department of Agriculture’s estimate of the cotton crop as about the same as was expected. On the other hand, tens of thousands of reputable citizens, who in all the private relations of life are decent and trustworthy persons, are daily breaking one law or another. When a state has ceased to be able to enforce law, when its citizens have ceased to feel any sense of duty to obey law as law, when they have[Pg 124] lost all respect for law as law, when they have lost all respect for law enforcement and the courts and officials charged with enforcement, it is clear that something more than merely one amendment to the Constitution, however unwise, must be sought for as the cause.