Intrinsic Limitations on the Power of Constitutional Amendment

Just as the war has educated the public in geography, so the question of amending the organic law of the country has stimulated discussion concerning our own legal and political institutions. The amendments providing for the direct election of senators and for federal power to levy an income tax attracted little attention compared with the sudden interest in legal questions which the so-called prohibition amendment has aroused, for it touches upon a matter of very intimate personal concern to many people and one over which very heated controversies have raged. Matters involving, or which are made to involve, moral issues always stir the deepest emotions and leave a wake or the rancoring sense of injustice. This feeling, left by the Civil War, has only for a few years been wiped out in the South. It is now present in many classes and places, especially in the North and East, as a result of the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment. Inquiry is lively as to the powers of Constitutional Amendment and their exercise.