of the fire company a few blocks away. How far would I get in trying to enforce the municipal regulations against the municipality itself? A friend of mine in another city, which passed an ordinance prohibiting the use of soft coal, spent several thousand dollars installing smoke-consuming apparatus in his plant. One day, sitting at his open window and being covered with soot from the three chimneys of an ice plant not far away, he decided to try his hand at law enforcement. He called up police headquarters and, after explaining the situation, received as answer, “You mind your damned business and we’ll mind ours.” The plant was owned by local politicians. It is all right for Mr. Hoover to say obey the law or work for its repeal; but what is a tug-boat captain to do if all his competitors are saving money by burning soft coal, and if the government authorities not only do not enforce the law but break it themselves? Is he to abandon his business in order to organize an almost hopeless crusade to get the law changed or enforced, or is he to give up his business entirely? Is he to burn hard coal in competition with soft, or is he to break the law himself? Time to organize committees, money to make their work[Pg 139] efficient—few people have either. And both are futile if the opposition is corrupt—and in power. No, Mr. Hoover, obeying the law until you can get it repealed is not so simple a way out in the America of to-day as your speech would imply. The subject can take us even further. The theory of our government—that the majority shall rule—cannot safely be stretched too far. It broke down in 1860, and may again. Indeed, in several respects it is not even the theory. A very considerable part of the legislation under which the people of our country live and do business has, in the last resort, been the determination of a single judge of the Supreme Court passing upon the constitutionality of laws by votes of five to four. It was shown lately that owing to the method of repealing clauses in our Constitution, three million people strategically located in the right states could block the will of all the rest of the nation. In such a case would it be the duty of the nation to obey the law?