Freedom under the Law
FREEDOM UNDER THE LAW WE HAVE here two interesting documents—Mr. Hoover's address to the recent Associated Press banquet in New York City, urging enforcement of the law; and the annual report of...
...But obviously prohibition has foisted upon the nation a reality—a civic reality—comprising on the one hand a declaration that the drinking of alcohol is wrong, and on the other hand an enforcement job which can end successfully only if the local communities themselves undertake it eagerly...
...It would be difficult to estimate the extent of the narcotic traffic, or to compute the dimensions of police protection given to various criminal enterprises...
...They indicate, primarily, a decline of respect for religion and the moral code...
...If a law is wrong, its rigid enforcement is the surest guarantee of its repeal...
...Generally speaking, both make the same point...
...To every citizen these facts will be of the gravest concern...
...Moreover, the statistics for Detroit indicate that 4,325 arrests were made last year in the interests of prohibition enforcement, while 28,804 (three times as many as in 1913) 2 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 were brought up.on charges of drunkenness...
...The farm youth has learned to know the city...
...For these things no government can create a substitute...
...people in high station have been overwhelmed and vitiated by incredible accessions of money and power...
...And in the longer reaches of Christian history, there were "worms who crawled from their tombs" to say nay to Caesar, and thousands who died stolidly when the assaults of tyranny were made...
...It is, in itself, an indifferent matter about which, ordinarily, we should make little fuss...
...What percentage of murder and manslaughter can be charged to bootlegging and its entourage...
...We do not believe in either the declaration or the job...
...For ourselves, however, we think that none of all these deleterious influences is half so important as prohibition...
...The United States may lay claim to having established a record for murder, robbery, embezzlement and forgery...
...And all this not because the individual is empowered to say which laws shall be obeyed, but because conscience has immemorially found that right and wrong are anchored in far deeper waters than those of statutes and criminal codes...
...It might proceed with certain very important reforms, of which congressional reapportionment is one...
...Well, we will say frankly that anyone bred to the tradition of western civilization—or even to the manner of Englishmen from whom our social forms derive—will never admit, while life is in him, that obedience to any and every law because it is a law can be exacted of the individual...
...We go on, therefore, to quote what is perhaps the most important part of Mr...
...Though the Detroit statistics show certain decreases in the number of murders and robberies committed during the past year, the rate of progress is startlingly slow...
...At any rate the point deserves comment, however little ultimate efficacy may attach to what we say...
...If it is right, its enforcement is the quickest method of compelling respect for it...
...It might eventually junk all that statutory mess which has resulted everywhere in conflict of laws, in provisions no one would dream of enforcing, in constitutional amendments, even, which have been disregarded for half a century...
...and the annual report of the Police Department, Detroit, Michigan...
...Who shall aver that this does not constitute a tremendous civic problem, independently of its implications with other forms of wrong-doing...
...We are some fifty times as efficient in the art of robbery as the British...
...We have lived through a period of tremendous readjustment...
...Though the President declared that only 8 percent of convictions for felony last year followed arrests for violating the Eighteenth Amendment, his declaration is not so reassuring as it might seem...
...These nation-wide processes have made for moral laxity because they rifled the treasury of the community conscience and left the individual free to dicker with the limited tyranny of his own convictions...
...It may well be that editorial opinion has sometimes gone too far in its opposition to prohibition...
...the immigrant has grown familiar with a new land...
...What are the rights of the individual with respect to the law...
...How much of gaming and prostitution has been deliberately fomented by the new traffic in liquor...
...But as things are now, what is the next move...
...Who shall dare tell the shades of Thomas More, of Hampton, and John Adams and George Washington himself, that reverence for the letter of any obligation is a sacred duty...
...On the other hand we have always held that whether or not a citizen is to be permitted to drain a decanter of sherry contains no such august moral implications...
...Hoover's address: "No individual has the right to determine what law shall be obeyed and what law shall be enforced...
...We are bold enough to surmise that if the government could rid itself of both it would be freer to take up the really pressing tasks of enforcement...
...I have seen statements published within a few days encouraging citizens to defy a law because that particular journal did not approve of the law itself...
...But all this has never sufficed in any country and cannot be relied upon here, where very definite cultural factors have aided the business of crime...
...Crime is extraordinarily prevalent...
...It may speed up the machinery of justice, turn a deaf car to projects of criminal reclamation, and make the penalties increasingly severe...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 1
