“A letter writer to a newspaper says, ‘If it is true that a community gets the kind of government it deserves, it is equally true that a law gets the kind of obedience it deserves.’ His assertion may be disputed, but still, if the Volstead law is not being respected, is it certain that it deserves respect? It is a law in the process of being tried out. If it is good we want it enforced. If it is bad we want it amended, but we do not want to be choked off from discussing it or testing it. There is no power in Congress to say what is right or wrong. The most that Congress can do is to say what is lawful or unlawful. The distinction is important. The practical judge of whether a law is right or wrong is the general community to which the law applies. If that community will not back up the enforcement of the law, it will not be enforced. It is yet to be demonstrated how far the Volstead law, as it stands, is enforceable. If its fruits do not please a majority of the people who live under it, it may have to be modified so that it will stand for something that is near enough to be the popular judgment of what is right to win popular support. There is a great deal of good in the present Prohibition movement. It put the saloons out of business. It checked the brewers and distillers in their over-strenuous efforts to sell their products. It accomplished benefits which probably could not have been accomplished except by the kind of clean sweep that the amendment was. But it was necessarily a rough job--an experiment to be tried out in practice. If its rules need modification, they may get it or they may not, but if not, they may be practically modified in enforcement. “Who is boss in this country? Is it the President, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the state authorities, the newspapers, the lawyers, the ministers, the doctors, or possibly the women? “None of them! Public opinion is the boss. In the long run, what public opinion demands it gets. Laws to be of any worth have to have sanction. That is, there must be something to make people who violate them feel that they are doing wrong. The laws of nature have abundant sanction. If you fool with the law of gravitation, you get bumped. There is no trouble about the enforcement of the law of gravitation. Nobody goes around begging you not to ridicule it. It takes care of itself, and if you flout it you pay the consequences. The Ten Commandments have a sanction of long experience. Some of them are obsolete, but the others are respected, and, though they are not directly enforced by the courts, laws based on them are so enforced. Public opinion hereabouts rests very considerably on the Ten Commandments. They have shaped the habits of thought and deportment of many millions of people, including most of those now living in this country.