4  Decision  on  Tincture  of  Ginger.      { A January fi92im' 
ties  of  life.  The  intent  of  the  legislation  undoubtedly  was  to  pro- 
hibit the  use  of  all  alcoholic  medicines  for  beverage  purposes  and 
all  uncertainty  could  have  been  eliminated  and  the  object  attained 
if  the  advocates  of  prohibition  had  contented  themselves  with 
Congressional  enactment  of  a  prohibition  of  the  purchase,  sale,  use, 
or  possession  of  any  alcoholic  medicine,  made  by  any  formula,  either 
in  the  authorities  named  or  by  any  other  recipe,  for  beverage  pur- 
poses. 
Fitness  is  a  question  of  individual  opinion  or  taste  that  should 
not  be  incorporated  in  a  law  and  much  less  handed  over  to  a  depart- 
ment for  interpretation  and  enforcement.  It  is  the  sole  duty  of 
Congress  to  legislate  on  national  questions  and  at  times  Congress- 
men and  Senators  have  been  greatly  exercised  over  the  encroach- 
ments of  the  executive  departments  upon  the  functions  of  the  legis- 
lative bodies.  Yet  Congress  has  only  too  often  itself  stimulated 
departmental  aggressions  and  bureaucratic  government  by  engaging 
in  the  popular  Washington  game  of  "passing  the  buck"  in  leaving 
matters  that  should  be  determined  in  the  enactment  to  rules  and 
regulations  to  be  framed  by  the  enforcement  division  of  one  of 
the  executive  departments.  Under  these  conditions  the  depart- 
ments of  the  Government  have  assumed  the  authority  to  interpret 
the  law  and  to  frame  rules  and  regulations  that  exceed  ofttimes  a 
fair  construction  of  the  enactment. 
Congress  cannot  delegate  its  powers  to  legislate  to  any  depart- 
ment and  the  granting  of  authority  to  frame  appropriate  rules  and 
regulations  for  the  proper  enforcement  of  an  act  does  not  empower 
a  department  to  make  interpretations  of  the  law.  In  a  recent  decision 
the  Court  again  held  "that  the  power  given  to  a  commissioner  to 
frame  rules  and  regulations  gave  no  authority  to  make  rulings  inter- 
preting the  law  and  that  any  person  relying  upon  any  interpretation 
of  the  law  made  in  a  departmental  ruling  does  so  at  his  peril." 
In  the  same  opinion  it  was  again  affirmed  that  "the  meaning  of  the 
act  is  authoritatively  determined  by  the  Court  and  not  by  the  Treas- 
ury Department." 
The  drug  trade  and  the  prohibition  enforcement  officers  have 
joined  in  the  endeavor  by  twistings,  verbal  gymnastics  and  subter- 
fuges, and  by  interpretations  of  the  language  of  this  Section  4  not 
in  harmony  with  the  dictionary  meaning  of  the  words  of  the  Act, 
to  make  the  impracticable  feasible.    Would  it  not  have  been  wiser 
