been given to the reports of Bar Associations and the comments of leading lawyers and statesmen. In this category the report of the Connecticut Bar Association and the paper of ex-President William H. Taft are recommended for particular perusal. The views of labor, always important and especially so at this juncture, are reflected in arguments by Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation, and other leaders of the wageearning forces. The opinions of our soldiers, especially those who saw service abroad, are recorded briefly but interestingly. The manner in which Great Britain has dealt with the drink question and the situation in Russia according to the latest authentic advices, are described. What we may expect in the way of enforcement laws is graphically set forth in the comment of a leading New York lawyer upon the proposed study in his State. A few of the most significant editorials from the leading journals are also included in the volume. One of the most striking features is the protest against ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment by the principal of one of the largest public schools in the City of New York. Finally, in order to serve particularly the purpose of the student, a brief bibliography of useful works on the drink question is given.

HUGH F. Fox, Secretary, United States Brewers' Association.

CONNECTICUT BAR ASSOCIATION

At a meeting of the State Bar Association of Connecticut held at Groton on August 15, 1918, the president was requested to appoint a committee to consider and report upon the legal and constitutional aspects of the proposed prohibition amendment to the Federal Constitution. In accordance therewith the president appointed as such committee, Hon. Silas A. Robinson, of Middletown, and Hon. Milton A. Shumway, of Killingly, former judges of the Supreme Court of Errors, Hon. Joseph P. Tuttle, of Hartford, former judge of the Superior Court, and Seymour C. Loomis, Esq., of New Haven, and Christopher L. Avery, Esq., of New London.

CHARLES E. SEARLS, President,

State Bar Association of Connecticut.

REPORT OF COMMITTEE

To the President and Members of the State Bar Association of Connecticut:

Your committee appointed to consider the legal and constitutional aspects of proposed prohibition amendment to the Federal Constitution beg leave to say that they have attended to the matters assigned to them and make the following report.

The amendment reads as follows:

"Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from, the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

"Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

"Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven

years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress."

We think it is especially the duty of lawyers to study the legal aspects of this proposed amendment, its character, and its effect, if adopted, upon the system of our Republican form of government, also the method of its submission by Congress, and the effect of the language wherein concurrent power to legislate is given to the Federal and State governments.

I.

Sumptuary laws are usually offensive and injudicious. They are an interference with what most people deem reasonable natural rights. Indulgence may sometimes be harmful to the individual but the individual insists he shall be left to decide that question for himself and cannot consent that statutes or constitutions shall tell him what he shall eat or what he shall drink or wherewithal he shall be clothed. Such legislative restrictions are deemed by many to be impertinent, and an undue interference with the private and personal rights of the citizen, so much so that whole communities and States are bitterly opposed to them and resent them.

But however objectionable mere legislative statutes may be, the situation can be easily remedied when a different view is taken by the people. If, however, such prohibition has become established in the Constitution of the United States, as is proposed by this amendment, it becomes a permanent curtailment of previous rights to which we will have to submit for all time or until we can procure it to be taken out of the Constitution through the same tedious and expensive methods by which the amendment itself was brought into being.

Your committee regard the proposition to put into the Constitution of the United States a prohibition against the manufacture, sale and transportation of liquors as unwise and unsafe, and as unstatesmanlike in every phase of it. We think it a dangerous precedent; we look upon it as the door to every kind of restriction by way of constitutional provision and by that we mean restrictions having to do with those matters which, if limited at all, should be limited by local laws. To pursue the course of adopting such an

amendment is to introduce irksome, irritating restrictions. It is to introduce too much paternalism into the system of general government, and also is a pronunced step in centralization of power in the general government which centralization we have always insisted must be guarded against as something destructive of local civil rights as we view them.

A provision of this sort placed in the Constitution would be a permanent Federal Liquor Law applicable to every State in the Union, even if some of the States and the people thereof were opposed to it and for this reason would, we think, be unenforceable in such unsympathetic localities.

Those who are advocating this amendment forget that one of the theories upon which this government was founded is that personal liberty should be preserved as far as possible, and that "absolutism in every form was intended to be extruded from government," as Dr. David Jayne Hill says in his "Crisis in Constitutionalism."

Leading statesmen, judges, lawyers and publicists in our country have for some time been warning the people against this forgetfulness; among such men are Judge Cullen, formerly Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals, who sounded such a warning in a public speech, and distinguished men in our country following him have endorsed that warning. Albert B. Boardman, Esq., a prominent American lawyer, in doing so said that:

"We are gradually getting away from that theory of personal liberty and looking at it in a different way. The government is expected to interfere in every direction for the public good and while it ought to interfere for the real public good, there is great danger in the tendency to reform everything and set everything right. It is going too far in the direction of restricting personal liberty."

Another great lawyer, John Brooks Leavett, Esq., said that Judge Cullen's note of warning was a needed one and that "he, (Judge Cullen) gave us the benefit of his ripened experience in passing on crude, half-baked laws to improve human nature by Act of the Legislature. In his career as lawyer and judge, he has witnessed the assaults on personal liberty starting with the assumption in prohibition laws of a right in A. and B. to pass a law that C. shall not