Even constitutions must be changed in order that our government may be in the hands of the living rather than in the hands of the dead. Those who wrote our Constitution were very wise men and yet the wisest thing they did was to include a provision which enabled those who came after them to change anything that they wrote into the Constitution.
Jefferson thought a constitution should be brought up to date by every generation. Nineteen changes have been made in our Constitution by amendment since the Constitution was adopted and four of these have been adopted within the last ten years. I venture to call attention to the later ones for two purposes; first, to show how long it takes to amend the Constitution and why; second, to remind you that these four great amendments have been adopted by joint action by the two great parties.
It required twenty-one years to secure the amendment providing for popular election of United States Senators after the amendment was first endorsed by the House of Representatives at Washington. For one hundred and three years after the adoption of the Federal Constitution the people tolerated the election of Senators by legislatures before there was a protest that rose to the dignity of a Congressional resolution. A Republican President, Andrew Johnson, recommended the change in a message to Congress. Some ten years later, General Weaver, a Populist Representative in Congress from Iowa, introduced a resolution proposing an amendment providing for the popular election of Senators, but no action was taken at that time. In 1902 a Democratic House of Representatives at Washington passed a resolution, by the necessary two-thirds vote, submitting the proposed amendment. Hon. Harry St. George Tucker, of Virginia, was the chairman of the committee when this resolution passed the House. A similar resolution passed the House on five separate occasions afterward (twice when the House was Democratic and three times when it was Republican) before it could pass the Senate. The amendment was finally submitted by joint action of a Democratic House and a Republican Senate and was ratified in a short time, Democratic and Republican states vying with each other in furnishing the necessary number. In 1913 it became my privilege, as Secretary of State, to sign the last document necessary to make this amendment a part of the Constitution. I have dwelt upon this contest at some length in order to call attention to the time it took to secure the change and to the fact that the two parties share the honour of making the change.
It took seventeen years to secure the amendment to the Constitution authorizing an income tax. The Income Tax Law, enacted in 1894, was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, by a majority of one, in 1895. In 1896 the fight for a constitutional amendment was inaugurated and the amendment was ratified and became a part of the Constitution early in 1913. This amendment, like the amendment providing for popular election of United States Senators, required many years, and for the same reason, viz., that the people were not alert as they should have been, not as vigilant as they should be. In the case of the Income Tax Amendment also, as in the case of the other, the two parties contributed to the change in the Constitution and share the glory together. The first amendment brought the United States Senate nearer the people and opened the way for other reforms; the second made it possible to apportion more equitably the burdens of the government.
The Income Tax Amendment was adopted just in time to enable the government to collect the revenue needed for the recent war. During the seventeen years covered by the struggle for this amendment the government was impotent to tax wealth; it could draft the man but not the pocketbook. What would have been the feeling among the people if we had entered the late war under such a handicap? How would conscription have been received if it applied to father, husband and son and not to wealth also?
And then, too, the Income Tax Amendment came just in time to answer the last argument made in favour of the saloon. Those engaged in the liquor traffic, after being defeated on all other points, massed behind the proposition that the government needed the revenue from whiskey, beer, and saloons. As soon as the government was able to collect an income tax the friends of prohibition were able to look the liquor dealers in the face and say, "Never again will an American boy be auctioned off to a saloon for money to run the government; we now have other sources from which to draw."
The third of the amendments was also a long time in coming and was finally brought by joint action of Democrats and Republicans. It is not necessary to trace the growth of this reform. Suffice it to say that the Christian churches were the dominating force behind the prohibition movement and that the South played a very prominent part in driving out the saloon. More than two-thirds of the Senators and members from the Southern States voted for the submission of National Prohibition after nearly all the Southern States had adopted prohibition by individual act. The first four states to ratify were Southern Democratic States—Mississippi, Virginia, Kentucky, and South Carolina. It is only fair, however, to say that the West contested with the South the honour of leading in this fight, and that the Northern States finally did nearly as well as the Southern States in the matter of ratifying. And it is better that the victory should be a joint one, expressing the conscience of the nation regardless of party, than that it should be merely a party victory.
But the real credit for leadership belongs not to any party or to any section, but to those whose consciences were quickened by the teachings of the Bible. Total abstinence was naturally more prevalent among church members than among those outside of the church, and this, of course, was the foundation upon which prohibition rested. The arguments against the use of liquor are the basis of the arguments in favour of prohibition. Because liquor is harmful the saloon is intolerable.
I venture to set forth the fundamental propositions upon which the arguments for prohibition rested.
First: God never made a human being who, in a normal state, needed
alcohol.