to say in this connection. In large parts of the country, even in the wet section, there is more public sentiment in favor of law enforcement than we dream of. I know that this is so in Connecticut, and the last election in Massachusetts shows that even in that State, which certainly cannot be considered dry, a tremendous proportion of the people are outraged by the flouting of the law and the corruption that is rampant. They are eager to know what to do. The chief difficulty in organizing them is finding something concrete for which they can rally. Even in New Jersey the dreadful revelations have brought a day of prayer and eventually must bring a reaction.

Then the women are not yet fully organized. In many parts of the country they had no vote on the Eighteenth Amendment. Of course, they will divide on the question, but taken as a body there is no doubt whatever that they are much more strongly in favor of enforcement than the men are.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that public sentiment is not a fixed quantity. It has changed on many subjects and on nothing more than on the liquor question. There has been a revolutionary change of opinion on this question in the last hundred years. Its continuation for a third of that time will bring a dry world. We must also remember that the remarkable growth of the temperance sentiment during the past century took place without any help from the law enforcement sentiment. Now hundreds of thousands of voters who were opposed to Prohibition or were lukewarm on it are in favor of strict enforcement of the law.

Occasionally one hears in the wet papers of a reaction against Prohibition in this country. This reaction has shown itself in peculiar ways. Each Congress elected since the policy was adopted has been drier than the one before. Except in New York, New Jersey, and possibly Maryland, each election gives the same evidence. Two years ago on a referendum Massachusetts voted by 120,000 majority against a State enforcement act. Last November, in spite of extraordinary efforts and the expenditure of enormous sums on the part of the wets, the people voted in favor of a State enforcement act by 4,000. If we can judge by the course of events in other States, a referendum two years hence

will bring a large enough majority on the dry side to discourage any further attempts to take the people's opinion on the subject. We are asked whether we mean to deny a man's right to argue and agitate for the repeal of an unwise law or Constitutional Amendment. I have never heard this right questioned. But every man is responsible for the use of his own judgment. It is easy for a man of ordinary intelligence to follow these propositions one by one. It is his duty in such a crisis to do it. He is only to be blamed if through sheer obstinacy, through bitterness felt toward the Prohibitionists, through a wish to gratify his own appetite, through the moral cowardice that makes him afraid to be different from his friends at the dinner table or at the club, he refuses to follow his reason and make a pitifully small sacrifice in a public matter of vast importance.

Through the change in public sentiment reasonable observance and enforcement of Prohibition are coming in time. It certainly will take many years and they will be years of great moral and political danger. We cannot prevent the completion of the process, but we can shorten or lengthen this unhappy period as we do our duty or refuse to do it. There are two clear, logical answers to the question that comes to every citizen. One is, I will obey the law and help enforce it. The other is, Let the country go to the dogs; I am going to have my liquor. Other answers, no matter how honestly used, are the result of clouded vision and twisted logic.

HORACE D. TAFT.

IS THE UNITED STATES SURE OF ITSELF?

BY JOHN HUNTER SEDGWICK

NATIONS, like individuals, have their developement which must always reach a stage when it can be asked whether they have attained a mature understanding. I do not ask those who substitute prejudice for thinking to do this, but it will surely be done by those who, whether they find it grateful or not to their personal and national self esteem, are bound to confess that on intellectual candor depends essential freedom. Anticipating and passing by the indignation of those who believe that the King in their own persons can do no wrong, let us ask ourselves whether the United States be quite sure of itself in face of the Scopes case and its by-products now exfoliating in various parts of the country?

As far as the literal aspects of that muddled contest are concerned, so far as its issue is to be regarded, it had but one issue, to wit, whether a certain teacher had disobeyed the prohibition of a certain Tennessee statute. What interests us now is a very much greater question. We need spend no time on what the hundred percenters, theological or political, Anti-Evolutionist or Pro-Evolutionist, may have to say; we can leave the personalities of the late Mr. Bryan and the surviving Mr. Darrow quite out of the picture; we can disengage our affections from protoplasm and our prepossessions from the angels; but we cannot disregard the fact that once a decision was reached in the Scopes case, phenomena were bound to show and did immediately show themselves, demonstrating with shocking clearness that the principle and practice of freedom of conscience and religious liberty are not at all so firmly entrenched in the United States as some may flatter themselves. Going a step further, we see that another spirit, that of persecution, has been merely held in abeyance, not removed or enlightened into tolerance. We see and with deep concern that men in the United States have taken liberty

too much for granted, mistaking the excellence of a principle for the enjoyment of its practice. They have reaped the usual reward of political laziness and unconsciously allowed themselves to become political nominalists, not doers of a word that must always have the proof of actual benignities. Contemplating this picture, conscience or a sense of humor ought to make us more patient with the Chinese confusion of programmes with facts.

It is a mistake to believe that because a political entity is called a democracy, by some metaphysical hocus-pocus thought in a democracy must be free. It is nothing of the kind, unless the individuals keep it so, and there is little that is easy about such a job. The name of a political system matters nothing; you can declare noble thoughts with a stencil; it is the motives and driving wishes of its elements translated into action that give the name respectability and the system duration. Again anticipating objections, I leave out of consideration certain measures taken in the United States during the Great War. They certainly curtailed some forms of liberty, but in the first place I believe them to have been necessary, and in the second to have been so exceptional that they cannot be taken into a general view of American social and political thought, irritating and ill judged as they sometimes may have been. I call attention to a curtailment far more wide reaching and insidious, the insistence on standardization of every sort in the United States. A man must not wear a straw hat after a certain date; he must not say too loud that the "Fathers" were less than supernatural, though with their imperfections they were giants; he must not object to hysterical or impudent commercial, social and bureaucratic impositions that would not be endured an instant in Europe; he must acquiesce in what a writer the other day called "ingenuity instead of craftsmanship"; he must endure with a moulded smile physical propinquities that are the denial of all decency and all freedom; he must, above all, welcome and submit to a mediocrity of thought appalling in its complacency. Is, then, freedom the right to be one's self, or the privilege of being like some one else? In but one department, money-making, is a man permitted to follow his own genius, and this money-making is even now preparing its own fate.

This mediocrity is given corporate expression in an extension of the suffrage whose last conspicuous trophy has been the Scopes trial, a trial that could never have occurred without a statute born of vote-expressed prejudice. Such a ball once set in motion must keep on rolling, and rolled it has to such good purpose that now gentlemen in the United States are looking about to see whether Federal laws cannot be passed to steady the ark of true belief. Laudable as this may be according to their ideas of theological decorum, it leads straight, or rather the spirit of it does, to persecution and the reappearance of ecclesiasticism which Bourbon-like has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It makes no great difference by what name the rose of ecclesiasticism is called-it always smells with the same sweetness; and here is the point which these hot gospellers quite overlook, that aside from stultifying and denying a principle of liberty, they have no means and there can be no means of keeping their operative majority. "To-day for thee, to-morrow for me," is a saying that had best be kept in mind by those with an addiction to regulation. I do not believe that a majority opposed to them but with an equal addiction can be created in the United States, because the people who neither talk nor go to Congress have a great deal of common sense, but it is always a possibility, and should it come to pass, the hot gospellers' own arguments and procedure would immediately be used against them. Those who have engineered this controversy have evidently been of the impression that not only was the earth flat, but that it never moves. They have taken it for granted that their majority must always prevail, and they have quite disregarded a most practical and important consideration. It was stated thus by Sir Frederick Pollock in his essay, The Theory of Persecution: "It is not the demonstration of abstract rights, but the experience of inutility, that has made governments leave off persecuting." Here have two considerations of the gravest kind, one based on the possibilities lurking in the future, the other on the patent experience of the past. Both are ignored by a body of opinion in the United States whose proportions, at any rate at this moment, are beyond what had been supposed.

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Observe that the Scopes case and its consequences take place