By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. The Occupat1on of Innkeeper. — Innkeepers were always in bad odor at the ancient common law, and so have continued, in legal view, down to the present time, except where relieved from their oner ous and unreasonable liability by the intervention of legislatures. The ancient rule was adopted from the necessity of the case. The inns were infested by thieves and robbers who throve by plying their occu pation there, or on the highways, and the innkeepers were frequently in league with them. " The rule is founded," said Chief Justice Shaw, " on the expedi ency of throwing the risk on those who can best guard against it." Nowhere can one obtain a more correct and vivid impression of the unsafety of inns two or three centuries ago than in Charles Reade's great novel, " The Cloister and the Hearth." Judge John K. Porter, of New York, was a great novel reader, and he was probably fresh from a perusal of that strong story when he wrote his fine opinion in Hulett v. Smith, 33 N. Y. 571; 88 Am. Dec. 405, which was instrumental in inducing a legislative relaxation of the strict common-law liability. But give a dog a bad name and it will stick, says the proverb. So al though innkeepers are nowadays nowhere in league with robbers and do not practice felonious robbery, yet somehow they are not held as a class in high re pute, and they have an unenviable reputation at least for extortionate charges. Judge Porter mildly hints when he says: " Open violence and robbery, it is true, are less frequent as civilization advances; but the devices of fraud multiply with the increase of in telligence, and the temptations which spring from op portunity keep pace with the growth and diffusion of wealth. The great body of those engaged in this, as in other vocations, are men of character and worth; but the calling is open to all, and the existing rule of protection should therefore be steadily maintained." Shenstone's classic picture of the inn and its welcome, and Goldsmith's idealization of its hospitality, and Dickens's fascinating picture of the The Maypole and its landlord and habituh in " Barnaby Rudge," are exceptional in modern literature. Dumas, in "Twenty Years After," speaks of innkeepers as " that particular class of society, which when there were
robbers on the highway was associated with them, and since there are none, has advantageously replaced them." Balzac says, in "Cousin Pons," — "The famous innkeepers of Frankfort, who make law-au thorized incisions in travelers' purses, with the con nivance of the local bankers." The modern prejudice against innkeepers is an an cient survival. Plato would have no innkeeper in his Republic. Plato's Athenian Stranger says : " All that relates to retail trade, and merchandize, and the keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonorable things. . . . But now that a man goes to desert places and builds houses which can only be reached by long journeys, for the sake of re tail trade, and receives strangers who are in need at the welcome resting-place, and gives them peace and calm when they are tossed by the storm, or cool shade in the heat; and then instead of behaving to them as friends, and showing the duties of hospitality to his guests, treats them as enemies and captives who are at his mercy, and will not release them until they have paid the most unjust, abominable and extortion ate ransom, — these are the sorts of practice, and foul evils they are, which cast a reproach upon the succor of adversity." In our day, a similar prejudice, or perhaps we should rather say, a contemptuous toleration, exists toward innkeepers as toward most other classes which minister simply toward the needs and convenience of the human body, such as tailors, shoemakers, dress makers, milliners, bar-tenders, stable-keepers, and many others which will occur to readers without the necessity of invidious specification. That is a very funny scene in Dumas' " Bragelonne " where the ar istocratic Porthas objects to being handled and meas ured in the ordinary way by the court tailor, and Moliere devises the ingenious expedient of having the measures taken from his image in a mirror. A recent sojourn at Atlantic City brought to our mind a sense of the strangeness and unreasonableness of this feel ing toward innkeepers, for innkeeping is the chief occupation of the town, and the existence of six hun dred inns and boarding-houses in a population of thirty thousand, shows, by force of numbers alone, that these excellent and indispensable people must be 141
