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Show Till: APPEAL TO THE LAW AI5IDING "There would be liule traffic In j illegal liquor if only criminals pat- j ronized it," said President Hoover in , his Inaugural addre.ss. This is true, as everybody knows. The patronage of a lawless industry by large numbers num-bers of otherwise law-abiding citizens manifestly rewards and stimulates crime. Mr. Hoover asks the country to recognize the full significance of this paradoxical feature of an evil situation. And he asks all reputable citizens who now traffic with bootleggers bootleg-gers and boze runners to renounce such associations, give up liquor and respect the law. If they are opposed to the prohibition law they have the privilege, as free Americans, to work for its repeal or amendment1. The president's appeal to the moral sense of all good citizens has great force, particularly in the present emergency, when disrespect for and defiance of law have wrought widespread wide-spread demoralization and have proved prov-ed to be prolific breeders of the gravest crimes. The commission of inquiry ' to be appointed by Mr. Hoover should deal fully and candidly can-didly with the issue raised by the president. The investigation will not tie complete if it does not cover the question of the past, the present and the probable future attitude of the general public toward the Volstead act and the eighteenth amendment. That inquiry necessarily will involve the question of the inherent reasonableness reason-ableness and hence the enforceability enforce-ability of statutory prohibition. President Lowell of Harvard university uni-versity presents his views on this question in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Drawing a parallel paral-lel between prohibition and reconstruction recon-struction in the south after the civil war, he takes the position that a law to which a large and respectable minority mi-nority is opposed on principle cannot can-not be enforced, be the penalties as drastic as it is possible to make them. Dr. Lowell apparently expects "Volsteadian prohibition to fail eventually, even-tually, as the reconstruction policy failed, but he stresses the need of a careful study of the whole problem and a frank report of the conclusions conclu-sions reached. President Hoover is wise in pre-pariBg pre-pariBg for a broad, searching, fair and fearless inquiry into the results of prohibition. While the Lowellian parallel is not altogether happy it "helps to emphasize the gravity of the issue by which the nation is confronted. |