The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment has not ended the Prohibition movement in America. So far, the task of enforcement has proved impossible. Probably there has been some appreciable reduction in the amount of fermented and distilled liquors consumed. Certainly the price of liquor has increased and its quality has deteriorated. No man can foretell the future: prophets are the jesters of posterity. Given the extreme difficulty of repealing a constitutional amendment (repeal would require a majority of two-thirds in the United States Senate, and again in the Federal House of Representatives, and after that a favourable vote in both branches of the legislature in three-fourths of the States) it seems probable that the Eighteenth Amendment will remain upon the statute books at least for a considerable time. However, there is already one amendment, the fifteenth, intended to secure the franchise to the negroes of the South, which slumbers on the statute books. At present, the Prohibition Amendment is a farce throughout many populous States, and the burdened taxpayer is loaded with the salaries of enforcement officials. The position of these enforcement officials somewhat resembles that of the Viking pirates of the ninth century. They have an enormous territory which they can raid almost at will, and throughout which they can annoy the inhabitants. But they are so few that, even with the enormous powers of movement and communication at the disposal of a modern Government, they are unable to constrain the activities of the millions among whom they operate. Like the old pirates again, these officials can frequently be bribed into harmlessness. Meanwhile, it is still possible to believe, if anyone desires to do so, that the immemorial traditions of Christendom will yield to a written law backed up by a handful of officials. The spectacle is of absorbing interest to the student of history, who personifies the memory of the race. In his more sanguine moods he sees the gently sloping vineyards by Loire, he hears Rabelais roaring with laughter from his deep lungs, and he looks forward to a happy confounding of fools. Again he feels an antique paganism settle down upon him like a grey mist, and he remembers the vengeance of the Gods as Euripides has told it in the “Hippolytus” and, above all, in the “Bacchæ.” For the student of history knows that the forces of our human nature, which the ancients personified as Gods, are immortal. Man may persecute but cannot kill them, and under his persecution they become demons who turn and rend him, as Savonarola and the old English Puritans found. Even St. Francis’ death-bed was darkened a little by his memory of his own austerities. “I have sinned,” he said, “against my brother the ass.” And what were the voluntary sufferings of a monk or of all monks put together, as sins against “the Gods” of life, compared with the deliberate, forcible, attempt to teetotalize a whole nation?