Prediction is dangerous work but I think there is one prediction not hard to make. That is, that our having so unthinkingly written unenforceable prohibition into the Constitution, and our then insisting upon the sanctity of that Constitution, is going to result in time in the awakened negroes’ insisting upon the observance of the Fifteenth Amendment. If Prohibition is sacred and inviolable because it is a constitutional amendment, how about negro suffrage? There are already rumblings being heard, and in my opinion the fanatical wets have not only split our country into bitterly opposed factions and decreased respect for the Constitution, but they have, without giving the matter a thought, brought the crisis of racial hostility nearer to us than it could ever have been brought in any other way. The time is rapidly coming, if the Methodists and Baptists and W.C.T.U. and all the other Prohibition forces insist upon the sanctity of the Eighteenth Amendment, when the fifteen million negroes, fast growing in wealth, education and racial self-consciousness and assertiveness, will insist upon the sanctity of the Fifteenth. But we may also ask Mr. Hoover about the Fourth Amendment, which the officials of his government are constantly violating, certainly in spirit. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unwarrantable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”[Pg 136] Yet, without warrant and without probable cause, the agents of Mr. Hoover’s own government have stopped, seized, searched and even murdered citizen after citizen in yacht or motor car within the past few months. Let Mr. Hoover and Mr. Mellon talk of law enforcement to the shades of John Adams and James Otis! What is the law-abiding citizen to do when driving his car on a lonely road with his wife or children he is told to halt by an un-uniformed man? How is he to tell whether the man is a thug who will rob him if he stops, or a legal officer of the United States government acting unconstitutionally? If he stops, he may be robbed or worse; if he does not stop, the agents of the United States government, as they have done time after time lately, may ruthlessly murder him. This is not a hypothetical case. It is an actual situation that confronts every citizen who has a car or a boat, and which has already resulted in the slaying of many innocent and law-abiding persons. Their wrongs and deaths have been thundered from the halls of Congress, but the government calmly says it will uphold its agents.