The passing of a Constitutional Amendment was now an almost every-day occurrence. Indeed, since the ratification of the Forty-fourth Amendment prohibiting the use of sarsaparilla as a beverage (coffee and tea had been legislated out of existence five years earlier) the enactment of a new Amendment excited little or no comment. Even the Seventy-ninth Amendment forbidding “the use of caviar, club sandwiches, and buttonhole bouquets, except for medicinal purposes,” received only casual notice in the Metropolitan Dailies.
The twentieth century was rapidly nearing its close and the political apathy that for fifty years had been gradually benumbing the Public morale now threatened to paralyze completely what little still remained of courage and initiative.
Even the latest work of Bernard Shaw, “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Infinite,” published (with a five volume preface) on Mr. Shaw’s hundred and fortieth birthday, aroused so little resentment that his projected visit to the United States had to be abandoned, in spite of the fact that “Bean and Soup o’Bean,” written only a week earlier, was acknowledged to have contributed largely to the triumph of the Seventy-ninth Amendment, making Vegetarianism compulsory in the United States.
The Hundredth Amendment passed quickly though the earlier stages of routine and perfunctory debate without any appreciable sign of anything approaching popular protest.
Here and there a guarded expression such as “Poor old Santa! I’m sorry he’s got to go!” was voiced, in the privacy of a club, by some elderly gentleman. Nothing more.
Somewhere, behind Somebody, was a Power that directed and guided—perhaps threatened. Nobody knew who or what or where it was or in what manner it worked, but work it did and to such purposes that, after a scant week of cut and dried speech-making that deceived no one, the Amendment was submitted unanimously by both houses of Congress and the foregone conclusion of ratification was all that remained to make the abolition of Santa Claus an accomplished fact.
Then, inevitably as fish follows soup, followed the ratification.
The Hundredth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting Santa Claus, slipped through the ratification process like an oil prospectus in a mail chute. There was only one hitch, Rhode Island, but since Rhode Island had refused to ratify a single one of the last Seventy-nine Amendments, her action was accepted as part of the program and a proof of unanimity.