“The law is being enforced, and the results are more than satisfactory. The brewers are skulking opponents. What are they doing now?” she inquired blandly of her audience. “Some are making candies, some soft drinks, some other things; but they are all making money, and are happy. Prohibition is a wonderful thing, and I am proud to be a citizen of the country that has adopted it.” How sweet and cheerful! But as she spoke, I wonder if she knew that almost around the corner real beer and whiskey were easily procurable. That as she uttered her oracular words, men with hip-flasks passed the door behind which she was speaking, on their way to joyful occasions. The law was never less effectively enforced, dear lady. You are living in a world of dreams and fancies. You should get about more, and meet the flappers and _jeunesse dorée_, who could tell you and show you a thing or two. Your rhapsodies are all very well; but your smug delight in conditions has a note of pathos to one who has observed the country as it is, and not as you would have it. Alas! you are but deluding yourself, and my heart goes out to you in your simplicity. Is the law being upheld when, at a dinner-party at a certain country club, two policemen in uniform were sent by the local authorities to “guard the place” while much liquor was poured? These minions of the sacred law were openly served with highballs, and they laughed at the Constitution of the United States. I saw them and heard them myself. They came to get drunk--and certainly succeeded. Everyone at that party deplored the company’s behavior, was loud in denunciation of Prohibition and what has come in its wake; yet went on eating and drinking and dancing with the casual remark that it was of no consequence whether or not they broke the law, since everyone was doing it. Is there any veneration for the law of the land when advocates of the Eighteenth Amendment, men who sponsored it publicly, in private deride it, and, at the mention of Mr. Volstead, sneer and jeer, and purchase cocktails in New York restaurants at a dollar apiece, gulping them down openly? I asked such an advocate--a politician who would like to be called a statesman--why it was that, if he believed in the Volstead Act, he continued to consume his daily quota of Scotch. I don’t believe anybody had ever ventured to put such a frank question to him. His wife, on my left, blanched--she, by the way, never touches a drop; but her exalted husband is fond of the cup that cheers--and inebriates. He has held high office, and has been loud in his advocacy of Prohibition--for the other fellow. He glared at me when I rashly put my question to him, lifted his glass high and cried out, intending to be witty (I thought him merely disgraceful, and drunk, as usual), “I drink as much and as often as I can, in order to lessen the supply!” And then he had the effrontery to add: “Of course I mean to see to it that the law is upheld, when liquor cases come up before me.”