the states whose constitutions provided for the referendum was not final. But the Supreme Court in decisions of June, 1920, unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the Volstead Act and the amendment, and swept aside the appeals from half a dozen states praying for a stay of action.

The Eighteenth Amendment has been the subject of a wider popular discussion than any other public measure of half a century. Objectors have maintained that it is an intolerable invasion of private rights; that it was forced upon the people against their will;1 that the expensive attempts to enforce it are farcical in their results; that, while it deprives the treasuries of license fees, it has enriched bootleggers and rum runners, who imperil the health of the people by the poisonous liquors they sell at exorbitant prices; and, worst of all, that it has encouraged a widespread contempt for law by the defiant and unpunished violation of its provisions. The defenders of the prohibition amendment, on the other hand, point to statistics to show the enormous decrease in the amount of liquor consumed, the reduction in the number of arrests for drunkenness; the elimination of the sinister influence of the saloon in politics; the increase in longevity as reported by the life-insurance companies, enhanced industrial efficiency, empty jails and workhouses, reduced police forces, and swelling savings-bank deposits. In general, each side is more strongly confirmed in its own opinion by its opponents' arguments, which it characterizes as specious

1 It is true that only 6780 persons out of the 105,000,000 citizens of the country voted directly on the Eighteenth Amendment in Congress and the state legislatures, but the overwhelming votes in favor of the amendment seem to justify the claim that it represented the will of the nation. The vote in the upper houses of the legislatures was 85 per cent in favor to 15 per cent against it, and in the lower houses 78 per cent to 22 per cent. Fourteen state senates and eight assemblies ratified unanimously. In thirty-four senates and twenty-one assemblies the adverse vote was less than 10 per cent. In South Dakota, Kansas, Idaho, Washington, Wyoming, and Utah there was not a dissenting vote in either house. All the states except Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey had ratified the amendment before the end of February, 1919.

2 The official figures of the United States Statistical Abstract for 1920 give the per-capita consumption of wines and liquors as 3.01 gallons, as compared with 9.34 gallons in 1919, 19.61 in 1916, and 22.69 in 1914.

in logic and unfounded in fact. But whatever one's private opinion may be on the subject, prohibition is the law of the land. No one can be forced to approve a law, but neither is anyone at liberty to break the law. One may advocate its alteration or abolition; while it stands, no one may defy its provisions. Therefore, while questioning the first sentence, one must indorse the second sentence of the public statement of Internal Revenue Collector Daniel C. Roper, on New Year's Day, 1920: "Whether prohibition is a wise national policy is no longer a question for debate or contention among good citizens. This step on the part of our people has been incorporated as an integral part of the Constitution of our country, and all law-abiding citizens will demand its observance."

THE PROPHET OF A BETTER UNDERSTANDING

The country was still in the turmoil of peace when the national conventions met in the early summer of 1920 to select the candidates to compete for the succession to the power which had already passed out of the hands of President Wilson. The conspicuous feature of the situation was the number of applicants for the nomination and the lack of leaders. Of the two strong men who had filled the political stage so completely in the first and second decades of the century respectively, the one was in his grave and the other stricken with paralysis. Roosevelt had made his peace with the Republican party during the war, leading the attack on Wilson in his speeches and writings. He was far and away the most popular Republican in the country, and was already being spoken of as the inevitable nominee of the party, when death overtook him in his sleep before dawn, January 6, 1919. There were two men among the contestants for the nomination by the Republican convention, which met at Chicago on June 8, 1920, who could claim in a sense to be the political legatees of Theodore Roosevelt: General Leonard Wood, his old favorite in the army and his close associate in the campaign for an ample preparedness program, and Senator Hiram Johnson, his running mate on the Progressive ticket of 1912

and the representative of his radical ideas on popular government. The men of the Hanna tradition, who wanted a candidate of unquestioned soundness on the matter of the government's favorable attitude toward big business, inclined to the wealthy, efficient governor of Illinois, Frank O. Lowden. A large group of people, including many of the women voters and the more liberal-minded of the professional classes, for whom Wood was too military, Johnson too radical, and Lowden too conservative, started a boom for Herbert Hoover, whose management of the Belgian relief and the food dictatorship during the war had revealed him as an administrator of the first quality. Hoover represented efficiency divorced from professional politics. But partisanship was fatal to the Hoover boom. The Democrats would not support him if he ran on the Republican ticket, and his advocacy of the League of Nations made him unacceptable to the senatorial group who, as it proved, had the control of the convention in their hands. A month before the convention met they had already selected one of their own number, Warren G. Harding of Ohio, a signer of the round robin of March 3, 1919 (pp. 716-717), and a Lodge reservationist on the Treaty of Versailles-although they waited for the psychological moment to impose him upon the convention.

The first ballot showed General Wood in the lead, with 287 votes to 211 for Lowden, 1331⁄2 for Johnson, 65 for Harding, and the rest of the votes divided among thirteen other candidates with fewer than 100 apiece. For several ballots the relative strength remained unchanged, each of the leading candidates, except Harding, gaining at the expense of the scattering vote. When it became evident that Senator Johnson, in spite of a lively campaign which he was himself leading, was weakening, and when Senator Borah announced that the radicals would bolt if either Wood or Lowden were nominated,' a group of senators

1 It was revealed at the time that the managers of both these candidates had used large sums of money, $40,000 having been spent to secure the Missouri delegation for Lowden. The Chicago Tribune of June 2, 1920, asserted that more than $2,000,000 had been spent by General Wood's backers, and that William C. Procter, the wealthy soap manufacturer, had led with a contribution of $500,000.

(including Lodge, the chairman of the convention, Smoot, Watson, Wadsworth, and New) held a meeting at Hotel Blackstone on the night of June 11, from which the announcement came that Harding was to be the man. The next day he received 692 votes on the tenth ballot. Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts was nominated for the vice presidency on the first ballot. The convention issued a platform condemning the "unconstitutional and dictatorial course" of President Wilson, and promising to "allay unrest, suspicion, and strife in the country" and to secure "the coöperation and unity of all its citizens" (a large order!). Public interest centered in the Republican pronouncement on "our deplorable situation in the eyes of the world," which was laid wholly to President Wilson's conduct: "The policy of the administration has been founded upon no principle and directed by no definite conception of our nation's rights and obligations [!]. It has been humiliating to America and irritating to other nations, with the result that, after a period of unexampled sacrifice, our motives are suspected, our moral influence is impaired, and our government stands discredited and friendless among the nations of the world." The platform commended the Senate for its "courage and fidelity" in its action on the Treaty of Versailles, and pledged the party, when it should come into power, to "fulfill our world obligations without sacrifice to our national independence.' President Wilson called the Republican proceedings at Chicago "the apotheosis of reaction," and declared that they "should have quoted Bismarck and Bernhardi rather than Washington and Lincoln."

The Democrats met at San Francisco on June 28, with even more divided counsels and clashing ambitions than had characterized the Republicans. For all his loss of health and prestige, the stricken President was the only man in the party who deserved the name of leader. But he resolutely refrained from attempting to exercise the slightest influence over the convention, except to beg it to nominate a man who supported his views on the League of Nations. When Chairman Cummings of the national committee called on him, with Senator Glass and Secre

tary Colby, before their departure for San Francisco, to ask if he had any message to send, he replied that he had none. His son-in-law, ex-Secretary McAdoo, was looked upon as the leading aspirant for the nomination, and, in fact, led on the opening ballots. President Wilson would have been gratified by McAdoo's nomination, but he gave no support to his candidacy, even, if we may believe Mr. Tumulty, in private conversation with McAdoo himself ("President Wilson as I Know Him,” pp. 494, 495). Mr. Bryan, the "peerless leader" of other days, had apparently lost his interest in politics, and was transferring his extraordinary powers of antagonism from the fight against gold and the trusts to a crusade against rum and evolution. When his motion for the introduction of a "dry" plank into the platform was defeated by a vote of 959 to 155 in the convention, he took no further interest in the proceedings.' He was out of sympathy with the administration, disapproving the President's course both in proposing to make the League of Nations the subject of a "solemn referendum" in the election of 1920 and in vetoing the Volstead Act. In answer to the Republican attacks on the administration in the Chicago convention, Chairman Cummings made a strong defense of the Wilson policies, declaring that the $2,000,000 spent by a Republican Congress in eighty investigations of the departments had only proved that we had conducted "the cleanest war ever fought in the history

1 His "heart was buried with the dry plank," he said-like Antony's in Cæsar's coffin. It will be remembered that Bryan had virtually given the nomination to Wilson in 1912. But now he was hardly less antagonistic to the administration than was Colonel Harvey himself. Commenting on the Democratic defeat after the election, he said: "President Wilson laid the foundation for the disaster. . . . He attempted to drive out of public life every Democrat who dared to differ from him even on minute details, while he made no effort to strengthen the Democrats who had made him the keeper of their conscience. He alienated all Republican support. He refused to deal with the Senate as a coördinate branch of the government. By preventing the ratification of the treaty, the President assumed responsibility for the nation's failure to enter the League of Nations. The people, confronted with the choice between presidential infallibility and respect for the opinion of the majority of the Senate, naturally chose the latter, and the Democratic party, by indorsing the President's position, invited the defeat that has overtaken it."