But legislation is not enough. An enlightened public opinion must be invoked. Nor will this be wanting. The country will rally in aid of the law, more especially since it is a measure of justice and humanity. The law is needed now as a help to public opinion. It is needed by the very people whose present conduct makes occasion for it. Prompted by the law, leaning on the law, they will recognize the equal rights of all; nor do I despair of a public opinion which shall stamp the denial of these rights as an outrage not unlike Slavery itself. Custom and patronage will then be sought in obeying the law. People generally are little better than actors, for whom it was once said:—
“Ah, let not Censure term our fate our choice:
The stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give;
For we that live to please must please to live.”[185]
In the absence of the law people please too often by inhumanity, but with the law teaching the lesson of duty they will please by humanity. Thus will the law be an instrument of improvement, necessary in precise proportion to existing prejudice. Because people still please by inhumanity, therefore must there be a counteracting force. This precise exigency was foreseen by Rousseau, remarkable as writer and thinker, in a work which startled the world, when he said:—
“It is precisely because the force of things tends always to destroy equality that the force of legislation should always tend to maintain it.”[186]
Never was a truer proposition; and now let us look at the cases for its application.
PUBLIC HOTELS.
I begin with Public Hotels or Inns, because the rule with regard to them may be traced to the earliest periods of the Common Law. In the Chronicles of Holinshed, written in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, is a chapter “Of our Inns and Thoroughfares,” where the inn, which is the original term for hotel, is described as “builded for the receiving of such travellers and strangers as pass to and fro”; and then the chronicler, boasting of his own country as compared with others, says, “Every man may use his inn as his own house in England.”[187] In conformity with this boast was the law of England. The inn was opened to “every man.” And this rule has continued from that early epoch, anterior to the first English settlement of North America, down to this day. The inn is a public institution, with well-known rights and duties. Among the latter is the duty to receive all paying travellers decent in appearance and conduct,—wherein it is distinguished from a lodging-house or boarding-house, which is a private concern, and not subject to the obligations of the inn.