LAW ENFORCEMENT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIII, 23 July 1929, Page 10

LAW ENFORCEMENT

»«g> | Following his public expressions of alarm at the lawlessness prevalent in the United Stales', President Hoover has appointed a National Law Enforcement Commission with Mr G. W. Wickersham, one of the most distinguished lawyers in America, as chairman. It is to make a sweeping inquiry into the state of the American law and tho machinery of its administration, with particular reference to the admittedly shameful and growing inability of that machinery to enforce the law. The commission is not to assume that prohibition is the roof of all tho present' evils, for President Hoover has said clearly enough that ho does not believe it is, but it will not bo asked; to avoid consideration of tho problem which, is born of the enactment of drastic, sumptuary legislation, The task of the commission is an immense one, and it will be many months before it is ended, and tho report, whatever its nature, will be fiercely criticised. Remarking that the commission forms "a group of exceptional ability," the Washington correspondent of the "Times" said that it would maintain a high level of impartiality, but extremists on either side of the Eighteenth Amendment dispute do not want impartiality j tJiey want theories supported. Tragedy may accordingly impend—tragedy in the sense in which Huxley said that Spencer conceived tragedy: the spectacle of a theory killed by a fact.