WELL MEANING exhorters, shocked at the spectacle of millions of perfectly decent and law-abiding Americans showing an utter disregard of the Prohibition law, are prone to insist that to violate this law, or to abet its violation, is just as immoral as to violate any other criminal law. The thing is on the statute-books--nay, in the very Constitution itself --and to offend against it, they say, is as much a crime as to commit larceny, arson or murder. But they may repeat this doctrine until Doomsday, and make little impression upon persons who exercise their common sense. The law that makes larceny, arson or murder a crime merely registers, and emphasizes, and makes effective through the power of the Government, the dictates of the moral sense of practically all mankind; and if, in the case of some kindred crimes, it goes beyond those dictates for special reasons, the extension is only such as is called for by the circumstances. However desirable it may be that the sudden transformation of an innocent act into a crime by mere governmental edict should carry with it the same degree of respect as is paid to laws against crimes which all normal men hold in abhorrence, it is idle to expect any such thing; and in a case where the edict violates principles which almost all of us only a short time ago held to be almost sacred, the expectation is worse than merely idle. A nation which could instantly get itself into the frame of mind necessary for such supine submission would be a nation fit for servitude, not freedom. But in the case of the Prohibition Amendment, and of the Volstead act for its enforcement, there enters another element which must inevitably and most powerfully affect the feelings of men toward the law. Everybody knows that the law is violated, in spirit if not in letter, by a large proportion of the very men who imposed it upon the country. Members of Congress and of the State Legislatures--those that voted for Prohibition, as well as those that voted against it--have their private stocks of liquor like other people; nor is there any reason to believe that many of them are more scrupulous than other people in augmenting their supply from outside sources. One of the means resorted to by the Anti-Saloon League in pushing through the Amendment was the particular care they took to make its passage involve little sacrifice of personal indulgence on the part of those who were wealthy enough, or clever enough, to provide for the satisfaction of their own desires in the matter of drink, at least for many years to come. The League knew perfectly that in some Prohibition States the possession of liquor was forbidden as well as its manufacture, transportation and sale; but the AntiSaloon League would never have dared to include in the Amendment a ban upon possession. Congressmen who voted for it knew that not only they themselves, but their wealthy and influential constituents, would be