VII. What Is Meant by Minding One's Own Business

It is related that when Adam was leaving the Garden of Eden he was heard to mumble to himself, “It is nobody’s business what I eat or drink.” Whether his complaint against the jealous proprietor of Eden was a just one must be left for theologians to discuss; certainly his sentiment finds an echo on many lips today. Whatever system of liquor control we may adopt, we can rightly require of it that it make clear to the man whose freedom it restricts the exact nature of the interests for the sake of which his wishes are sacrificed. And a regime which would distinguish the qualified drinkers from the unqualified, the legitimate uses of liquor from the illegitimate, must be based upon clear principles of policy determining [p.116] when the public is and when it is not concerned with what a man eats or drinks. How are a man’s own affairs to be identified as such? What is meant by “minding one’s own business?” When and where and why does an action become illegitimate meddling?

When de Tocqueville made the keen observation that an American, “condemned to confine his activities to his own affairs would be robbed of one-half of his existence,” the doctrine prevailed in the French world of thought that there was an absolute distinction imposed by a Law of Nature, forever setting apart those things which are the concern of the individual from those which may legitimately constitute a preoccupation for his neighbors. Tocqueville would hardly have believed what every student of society accepts today as fundamental: that society itself decides what affairs are one’s own business. There are some societies which, in fear of pestilence, concern themselves with a man’s piety but not with his sewage; other societies, driven by the same fear, supervise [p.117] the garbage disposal of every household, but pay no attention to its manner of worship. In all fields of interest and activity – sex, food, work, sleep, art, entertainment – there are zones wherein society does not accurately define the extent of the community’s interest or the individual’s freedom. No absolute and eternal standard distinguishes private from public affairs, nor separates the business of one individual from that of another. And even the standards of social intervention set by a community are often vague and full of inconsistencies.

A society lives by doing incompletely two contradictory things: imposing a common standard upon all, and requiring a special contribution from each of its members. The ideal of law and the ideal of specialization or division of labor are respectively realized by making society more uniform and by making¹ it more varied. From this situation two ethical principles emerge. With respect to the ideal of uniformity it is good that every individual should conform to the laws, customs and standards; with respect to the ideal of [p.118] division of labor it is good that all people should “mind their own business,” and refrain from interfering in the affairs of others. The more definitely fields of responsibility are marked out, the more completely is labor divided. In every society, from Plato’s Republic to the United States of America, there is some point of equilibrium between the claims of these two principles.

The principle of division of labor applies primarily to the production of material things; the principle of uniformity is primarily effective on the mental level. A man’s food is his own and does him good only to the extent that he appropriates it to himself; his talk, on the contrary, is shared with his neighbor and is of value to him only to the degree that it is shared. Property is the primal pattern of the principle of seclusion, as language is the primal expression of the principle of conformity. The seclusion of the individual, his specialization in his own field, his separateness from the rest, is greatest in property matters and least in matters of gossip and talk. [p.119] Property rights could perhaps be defined as the amount of exclusiveness which a society will permit an individual with respect to material things. The principle of uniformity, manifesting itself in gossip, opinion, moral precept or law, tends always to override the exclusiveness of the individual. When in describing some human relationship we wish to emphasize the exclusiveness of the man standing against the crowd, we tend to use the property concept as a metaphor applying to his situation. We say that the man was “minding his own business,” and the other was “interfering with someone’s affairs.”

But the question of minding one’s own business does not always arise on the same level. Meddling can take the form of discussion, exhortation, of litigation or prosecution. The lowest level of interference is that of gossip and curiosity; above that level there is the kind of persuasive intervention of which the typical example is the evangelical enterprise of spreading a religion. Still more definite is the kind of intervention in which [p.120] one man interferes with another in order to protect what he regards as his own rights. The typical example of interfering with another’s business upon this level is the lawsuit in defense of a property right. Every creditor who sues a debtor is interfering with the debtor’s business, but public opinion does not reproach him for so doing. The highest level of intervention is that which is undertaken by the police officers of the state in the enforcement of criminal law. We can imagine a man whose drinking in one community would be an object of gossip; in another it would give rise to attempts to persuade him to alter his habits; in another it would cause his wife to sue him for divorce and separate maintenance; and finally in some communities he would be arrested for unlawful possession of liquor. At which point would it be said that there begins an unjustified interference with his freedom to eat and drink as he pleases?

Under what circumstances will he recognize the neighborhood’s right to talk about him, but not to exhort him, to exhort him but not to sue [p.121] him, to sue him but not to have him arrested?

On the level of gossip there are very few things in which Americans protect themselves from intervention. There are some things, such as sex in marriage, which are, in the opinions of many, properly to be exempted from interference even on the level of curiosity. They are not to be talked about. In some circles it is considered very rude to ask how much money one makes, or how much something has cost; elsewhere these are accepted topics of conversation. As to eating and drinking, most people do not restrain their curiosity. They discuss their neighbor’s doings. They do not think it indiscreet to ask each other what there was to drink at So and So’s party; they criticize bad cooking and bad liquor, and no one resents their idle comment.

On the level of exhortation the American is much more sensitive. Both the Wets and the Drys regard the evangelism of the other party as a grievance to themselves. The resentment of the drinker urged by some preacher to sign the pledge [p.122] was a familiar source of comedy until the temperance campaign was dropped in 1918. The temperance campaigners themselves always condemned the illicit persuasiveness of saloon-keepers and boon companions. Under the regime of the Volstead Act there continued unabated a kind of inverted prohibitionism enforced in some places by group opinions. There are circles in which it is required that a host shall provide liquor for his guests. The penalty for disobedience is qualified social ostracism. The late comer at a party is expected to “catch up” with the rest. In many groups the broad tolerance which still recognizes the right of a guest to refrain from drinking is rare indeed. Where the right to persuade in favor of liquor is so widely acknowledged, it is illogical to deny the right to exhort against liquor. Let the drinker have strength of mind to resist signing the pledge; let the hero of the temperance song have courage to say No.

So long as the people who concern themselves with the drinking habits of others remain on the [p.123] level of curiosity or evangelism, their activities may give rise to resentment, but create no serious social problem.

Though the legitimacy of the gossip and gospel types of interference in other people’s affairs be recognized quite generally throughout the country, it does not follow that activities on these levels are everywhere equally effective. The small town is everywhere the unit in which curiosity and gossip play a large part in life; the great city offers its people an anonymity which shields them from criticism. The nomadic city-dweller, who migrates every year from one apartment house to another exactly like it, does not know his neighbors well enough to criticize them effectively, even if he were inclined to do so. Apartment-house gazing in cities – the indoor sport of watching the windows of nearby apartments – takes its special character from the anonymity of city life. In a village there is also a habit of watching one’s neighbor from behind half-drawn blinds, but with a totally different object, because in village life one views [p.124] every act of a neighbor as part of a biography; in apartment-house life the incidents one notices in a neighbor’s life are mere isolated pictures.

Because of the anonymity of city relationships, the evangelical type of intervention in the lives of others is also particularly ineffective in cities. To live in a great city is in fact to live a double life. Under normal circumstances the working environment and the living quarters are two different worlds. It is almost impossible to hold anyone steadily under the influence of exhortation. Those who seek to exert their influence on their neighbors under city conditions therefore resort to the mechanical devices of advertising campaigns and newspaper publicity enterprises, in which an impersonal surface speaks to an anonymous crowd. Under these conditions persuasion tends to affect only those who are already persuaded; there is no concentration of homiletic energy upon those who stand most in need of it. And this is exactly the reverse of the situation obtaining in the village. [p.125]

Persuasion in influencing drinking habits, therefore, is effective to a degree inversely proportionate to the density and concentration of population. It also diminishes in efficiency as one passes from a culture area which we can call Middle Western (although it is spread over many other areas) to a culture area which can be designated as Eastern (although not all of the eastern section of the country participates in it.) The difference between these two cultures is so marked that the good citizen of Iowa or Kansas who goes to an eastern community will often feel as if he were in a foreign land. The cool urbanity of the Easterner irritates him. Conversely, some sales managers say that they cannot successfully entrust middle western territory to eastern men. What is the difference between these two cultures?

The middle western culture is built upon a substratum of rough, warm Methodism which urges upon people the primitive communal duties of doing good to one’s neighbor, and aiding the neighborhood enterprise. The fund of energy and social [p.126] habit that was once drawn upon to bring together a quilting-party, a corn-husking or a log-rolling gathering is still available. It is used in the W. C. T. U. The Middle Westerner’s sincerity in wishing to do good is equalled only by his awkwardness in doing it. The Easterner has a different spirit. He feeds his soul upon the leavings of an intellectual Unitarianism, a snobbish Anglicanism, or a frigid Puritanism, and none of these nourishes in him any hot zeal to improve his fellow-men. Wherever this Eastern culture predominates, the effectiveness of persuasion is low. The individual thinks of conduct in terms of “breeding,” which is not transferred to anyone by a hortatory technique. The women prefer the D. A. R. to the W. C. T. U. There is a tendency for this Eastern type of culture to take possession of great cities, for the Middle Western type to linger longest in the small towns.

These two cultures are coming to hate and to fear each other. Never was the conflict more clearly demonstrated than in the last Presidential [p.127] election, in which Al Smith was cartooned to the Middle West as a city slicker, while Hoover was depicted as an honest farm boy who had made good. It is noteworthy that Prohibition has been most successful in the small Middle Western towns, that is, in precisely those areas where interference by means of discussion and exhortation are most effective, and least successful in the large Eastern cities, that is, in the areas which depend for social control upon litigation and prosecution.

The urban community, far more free from informal meddling by neighbors, is much more subject to police regulation than the small town. It is here that litigation flourishes. Whereas in a small town a lawsuit between two citizens over damages in an auto accident is a matter of public scandal, in a city it is a matter of course. The fire laws, housing laws, traffic regulations and licensing regulations have in the city a complexity and volume which the small town can avoid. It is often argued in connection with the problem of liquor control that modern life is requiring more [p.128] and more public regulation, and this is especially true of modern urban life. But it is noteworthy that liquor regulation has been most successful in the places where police regulation in general is least used, and where the police equipment is smallest. This fact leads one to question whether the penal laws have ever been the really effective agencies of liquor control, and whether the successes in reducing liquor consumption claimed for Prohibition are not actually a residual result of work once done on the persuasion level for temperance and abstinence. For on this level we are ready to admit that others may concern themselves with what we eat and drink.

Upon that level of human relationships where separateness is most highly consecrated, that is to say, on the level exemplified by the property right, it is usually easy to determine whether a given thing is or is not “any of my business.” One can go to law about it. Every lawsuit is really a test whether a certain matter is or is not any of the plaintiff’s business. The whole legal machine of [p.129] a modern state is occupied principally with the heavy task of marking out the limits which separate one citizen’s business from another’s.

Even a communistic regime must set definite spheres of responsibility and authority, and must define the relations of individuals to things and to each other in such a way that people know which actions are one’s business and which are not. In a communistic state, or in a great organization of slaves, or in an army, these distinctions are likely to be even more rigid and definite than in a society which makes use of our more familiar property concept. The fact that the economics of division of labor requires specialized responsibility, so that each man shall have his own affair to occupy him, and none shall take it upon himself to meddle in the other’s affair, is illustrated in any hierarchy or any organization. The Russian peasant on one of the newly established communal farms can say to a peasant on another farm, “It’s none of your business how we do our planting,” but he cannot say this to one of the members of his own com[p.130]muna. But if in the course of the day one task is assigned to him and another task to his fellow-member, he can legitimately resent interference by the latter, and say to the meddler, “Mind your own business.” The Soviet Government itself through its lawcourts or administrative officials must in the last instance be able to decide when the protest against the meddler is justified, and when it is not. In the same way an army court-martial will inquire whether such-and-such an officer was acting in line of duty when he gave such-and-such an order – was he in fact “minding his own business” or not?

If civil law in a modern state is the instrument for defining the limits of an individual’s business, criminal law is chiefly important as a supplement to civil law. This fact is attested not only by the enormously greater volume of business that comes to the courts under the civil code, but also by the history of the law itself. The early Germanic laws from which our legal system is derived were principally devoted to the protection of private rights, [p.131] and were in fact privately enforced. The idea that the criminal had harmed the whole community was familiar only in connection with crimes of impiety and cowardice in war. If a murder was committed, the earliest legal result was that the relatives of the slain had the right to retaliate upon the relatives of the slayer. Then the community intervened by supervising a private transaction in which the offending family paid a wergeld to the kinsmen of the murdered man. The law which regards the murderer as an offender against the State, whom the forgiveness of the kinsmen of his victim cannot clear of the consequences of his crime, is a much more recent development. The old law still lingers on in the form of the right to damages which the dependents of a murdered man can make good against the murderer. The sections of the penal code which relate to thefts and frauds are even more directly based upon the prior existence of property rights defensible by private lawsuit.

The same thing is true with regard to auto [p.132] mobile legislation. In the use of our highway system the reckless driver, the man driving on the wrong side of the road, the man who cuts in on another, is denounced by everyone on the road. He cannot successfully defend himself by saying that it is nobody’s business how he drives his car. The line between what is his business and what is his neighbor’s business has been drawn. The problem of how much freedom he has in using a vehicle on the highway has been threshed out in hundreds of thousands of damage suits. The other drivers on the road have rights which they can defend in court if any harm comes to them. And the police official supplements the work of the civil courts by interfering with those who overstep the limit already established. In the development of our institutions of social control the natural process requires that individual responsibility and freedom be first defined by civil law, and later given additional protection by the criminal law. In general people are more reluctant to accord a right of interference to a police officer than to a private [p.133] person who has been specifically wronged. Therefore, it might be expected that only in cases where a drinker had already acknowledged the right of injured persons to sue because of him would he concede the right of the police to interfere with him.

If we turn, then, to seek on the level where rights are analogous to property rights for the limit that restricts a neighbor’s right to interfere with a man’s drinking, or a man’s right to drink in defiance of his neighbor, an amazing fact comes to light. This whole area of doubt is relatively unexplored by the civil law.

It is one of the most curious chapters in the history of liquor control that the extent and limitations of civil-law rights in drinking have never been adequately studied or adjudicated. The Prohibitionists did, indeed, concern themselves in the decision of one property-right question. It was decided that the owner of liquor-producing or distributing properties had no claim to compensation when the State destroyed their value. But the [p.134] whole theory of Prohibition pointed to the existence of other property rights to which no one ever paid sufficient attention. The prime symbol of the Prohibition campaign, from 1830 to 1930, has been the picture of the drunkard’s wife. Here the argument against liquor was strongest. Did liquor control interfere with the personal liberty of the drinker? Yes, but it gave personal liberty to his wife. Without this idea in its doctrine the Prohibition movement would have died before it was born. Nobody knew how many dependents of drinkers were suffering from the bad habits of the husband or father; the estimates were always high, and there never existed any research machinery adequate to the task of checking them. But everyone knew that there were cases where liquor did this kind of damage. The anti-liquor movement mobilized in the defense of these injured parties. But it did not interest itself in their rights to compensation for damage suffered. It studied the property rights of the liquor-seller, and found them invalid; it studied the relation of [p.135] liquor-seller to the damage, and found him responsible for it; but it did not devote much thought to the property rights of the persons injured, or seriously try to enable the sufferers to collect compensation from those who were responsible.

This was the point at which the liquor movement got off the track. This was the crisis of the liquor control movement, in which the narrow preoccupations of the clergy crippled it for life. The enemies of the saloon wanted to put into jail the saloon-keeper, the owners of the industry, the drinker – anybody or everybody could go to jail, but they were not willing to begin by making the saloon pay for the damage it had caused.

This neglect in developing the civil damage aspect of liquor control is all the more remarkable because most states provided themselves with civil damage laws which laid the foundation for the adjudication of the real injury caused by liquor. These civil damage laws, creating a right of action against the dispenser of liquor in favor of anyone injured by an intoxicated person, were [p.136] invented in the ’fifties, and became standard in the various state codes in the ’seventies. The New York law, passed in 1873, is a sample of the type of statute which should have been the starting point of a healthy system of liquor law.

Every husband, wife, child, parent, guardian, employer or other person who shall be injured in person or property or means of support, by any intoxicated person, or in consequence of the intoxication, habitual or otherwise, of any person, shall have a right of action in his or her name, against any person or persons who shall, by selling or giving away intoxicating liquors, cause the intoxication, in whole or in part . . .; and any person or persons owning or renting or permitting the occupation of any building or premises, and having knowledge that intoxicating liquors are to be sold therein, shall be liable, severally or jointly, with the person or persons selling or giving intoxicating liquors aforesaid, for all damages sustained, and for exemplary damages. . . .

These laws were used. There are leading cases interpreting them in the law reports of half the states in the Union. The principle was incor[p.137]porated in many of these laws that a relative of a drunkard could serve notice on retailers, and after the serving of notice collect heavy damages for every sale. In New Hampshire the minimum damage the jury can award under the statute is one hundred and fifty dollars for each offense. The collection of damages under this law was secured by a right of recourse against property owners and bondsmen of the retailers. The principle was laid down by the courts that if damage resulted from a long spree, the whole amount of the damage could be collected from any one of the dealers who had sold liquor to the reveller, and it would be left for him to collect from other dealers who had been contributory to the same damage. Some of these laws were comparatively ineffective because they applied only to illegal liquor sales. There have been some awards under these statutes even since the passage of the Volstead Act. A Missouri case resulted in an award of $25,000, collected by the dependents of a man permanently injured by drink; a New Jersey case [p.138] recently resulted in the award of $12,000 where there was a death due to liquor. Now it argues strangely as to the interest which the Anti-Saloon League takes in matters of this kind that when a general complaint was raised against the use of poison in denaturing alcohol, the League generously offered to help dependents of persons killed by poison liquor by prosecuting the bootleggers for murder, but never, from its inception to the present day, has the League attempted to give real help to those who have suffered at the hands of the saloon-keeper, by sponsoring them in the collection of indemnities, nor even by propagating the information that these protective laws were on the statute books.

Indeed, any systematic work to bolster up and improve these civil rights would have deflated an enormous amount of Prohibition argument. The sob story about the parent whose boy had begun to loiter at the tavern to the loss of his soul and the destruction of his body, would have provoked the query as to why the parent did not resort to [p.139] the remedy the law gave him, and make the tavern-keeper pay so heavily in damages that he would close his doors to boys. The Massachusetts law gives this right of action in favor of parents, and provides that the liquor-seller cannot offer as his defense that he did not know the buyer was a minor. The heart-rending tale about the drunken husband whose children were in need of food would have come to an ineffective ending if the conclusion had been that the wife, with the legal advice offered her by some Anti-Liquor Society, had obtained enough money from the saloon-keeper to buy food and clothes for the whole family for the year, and the saloons of the town had blacklisted her husband and refused him entrance. There are cases under the Civil Damage Laws establishing the right of the wife to compensation not only when the husband’s drinking habits have diverted money from the family to the saloon, but also when the husband’s ability to hold a job has been diminished by drinking. There are laws providing that when a man is in [p.140] jail because of crime committed under the influence of intoxicants, the seller of the liquor must support his family while he is in jail. Every branch of civil-damage legislation killed a branch of the argument for Prohibition. The more effective the civil-damage legislation was made, the less justifiable would become the indiscriminate interference involved in Prohibition. The development of these two liquor control programs were therefore alternative rather than supplementary to each other, since the success of the civil-damage system would preclude the possibility of obtaining the passage of a Prohibition law.

Moreover, the passage of Prohibition laws defeated the purpose of civil-damage laws by destroying the property responsibility of the liquor-seller. A right of action against a bonded liquor-dealer, with recourse against the owner of his premises as well as the bondsmen, is a valuable right. A right of action against a bootlegger is usually worthless. The trend of liquor-control [p.141] legislation in support of the civil-damage laws would have been to increase the financial responsibility of the liquor business, instead of driving the whole industry underground. Just as the development of the civil-damage laws would have precluded the enactment of the Prohibition laws, so the enactment of Prohibition almost nullifies the application of the principle of civil damage.

The Prohibition law itself suffers from the fact that civil-damage laws were not allowed to grow to maturity. Although the history of law, in everything from the law against murder, at one end of the scale, to traffic regulation, at the other, witnesses the prior establishment of limits upon private rights, and the subsequent entrusting of public authority with penal powers to cause these rights to be respected, nevertheless, our liquor legislation never passed through the right-defining stage. It is, therefore, quite natural that, aside from recognized rights of discussion and persuasion, there is no commonly-accepted view as to when it becomes someone else’s business what [p.142] a man may eat or drink. And without such a consensus, it is quite as one might have expected that the law empowering police officials to enforce rights which are not in themselves acknowledged or clearly defined, would lead to endless confusion.

The preachers and women who pushed the liquor-control problem directly from persuasion methods to criminal-law methods, without passing through the preparatory stage of civil-law definition of rights, were acting in an ignorance that is easily explained, not only by their lack of professional qualification to understand the principles involved, but also by the prejudices of the age in which they formulated their views. It was an age in which the concept of absolute property right as the converse of an absolute right of individual freedom ruled legal and political thinking. A man could get a legal education in those days by reading Blackstone’s Commentaries. The problem of slavery and of liquor control both presented themselves to these minds in the same terms: a given kind of property is wicked, and must be [p.143] abolished, or else it is rightful and must be protected. In the history of jurisprudence the men of that day might have found other ways of working away from slavery than Abolition. Perhaps the other way would not have been equally good, but it was at least worth studying. They might have tried gradually to increase the legal rights of slaves, protecting their persons against corporal punishment, then giving them the right to acquire a personal property and protecting it by law, gradually limiting the right of master over slave until the institution was transformed through serfdom to freedom. The evolution of slavery in Roman civilization might have suggested these ideas to them. We are surprised, not that the men of that day failed to do these things, but that they did not even think of them, or discuss them. As a matter of fact, the only solutions they seriously discussed were confiscatory emancipation and compensated emancipation. The parallel between Abolitionism and Prohibitionism is not to be overdrawn, but the two are alike at least in this [p.144] respect, that they could draw from their age only a very limited supply of legal and political ideas, and only one idea about property: that it was either entirely right or entirely wrong.

It does not appear that the civil-damage laws were looked upon as providing a starting point for liquor regulation and control. They seem rather to have been intended to satisfy particular grievances. That a liquor-control regime might emerge from them seems not to have occurred to anyone who was interested in the problem. Dr. Cherrington, General Secretary of the World League Against Alcoholism, in an address on May 22, 1930, described the “nine principal programs advocated by the Drys in the interest of mitigating the evils of the beverage alcohol traffic during the past century.” He did not mention the civil-damage laws among the nine. Nevertheless, these laws had in them the germs of all acceptable liquor-control systems because they made the distinction between innocent and noxious uses of liquor clearer, instead of obscuring it, and they [p.145] defined those instances in which it literally becomes another person’s business what I eat or drink.

In describing the circumstances under which it can become the concern of a third party how a man may eat or drink, the civil-damage laws begin with the most obvious and direct kinds of damage – namely, damage to person, property and means of support. They specify certain relationships wherein damage of this kind is most likely to ensue, namely, those of husband to wife, parent to child, and employer to employee. The man who beats his wife when drunk or spends all his weekly pay check in the saloon or loses his job because of his drinking habits has forfeited his right to say that it is no one’s business what he may choose to drink. Public opinion goes easily along with the civil-damage laws to this point. There are other situations in which the right of meddling in another’s drinking habits is less clear. A case came up under the civil-damage law in which a farmer sued a liquor-dealer for the value [p.146] of a horse lost through the negligence of a drunken hired man. But perhaps the hired man would have been negligent even though sober. Are employers to have the right to regard themselves as damaged by any diminished efficiency in their workmen which they attribute to drink? But they have another remedy for such damage in the reduction of wages or the discharge of the offending workmen. If the workmen are docked or discharged, their families have a right of action for loss of support due to liquor. Clearly, there are borderline cases where the extent of a third person’s interest in a transaction between a liquor-dealer and a drinker is ill defined. Where damage to “person, property or means of support” is involved, the chief difficulty is to lay down the rule as to just how close must be the relation between the drink and the damage in order to create a legitimate right of intervention.

There is another type of damage suffered by third parties in the transaction between a seller and a drinker. This is the moral and psychologi[p.147]cal damage which appears when liquor enters as a factor in family disorganization. The feeling of a wife disgraced by her husband’s habits, or the mental distress which accompanies family friction due to drink, or the suffering of a parent whose child is learning drinking habits of which he disapproves – all these are acknowledged by enlightened opinion as very real grievances, because the family has a right to a certain moral solidarity. The civil-damage laws never gave very extensive recognition to these rights. They did not allow any rights to indemnity for intangible losses, except indirectly, in the right which parents received to sue dealers who sold to their minor children, and the right that lay in any member of a drunkard’s family to protect him from temptation by serving notice against selling, and suing any dealers who sold, to the designated family member.

This consequence of the moral solidarity of the family is acknowledged by public sentiment even where the law does not give it recognition. The [p.148] following notice was clipped from the Grant County Press of Petersburg, West Virginia, by the indefatigable editor of the American Mercury:

All Moonshiners and Liquor Handlers are hereby warned not to give or sell my father, Sam Self, a drop of liquor in any shape or form. All parties not heeding this notice will be dealt with according to law.

Jack Self.

The private wrong which is heard in this press notice demanding its remedy speaks more distinctly than the criminal code, because its right to speak is more widely admitted. Intervention between buyer and seller of liquor under these circumstances by a member of the family involved is not regarded as a violation of personal liberty. The civil law has no difficulty in identifying these cases, because the connection between the drinking and the damage is explicit and direct. The difficulty arises rather in estimating the amount of the damage.

There is also a type of property interest and [p.149] a type of moral interest which the community can claim upon ordinary principles of equity with regard to the drinking habits of its members. If a man becomes a pauper through drink, or if he becomes an object of police action because of intoxication, the community has a property interest in the matter. The civil-damage laws were not drawn to permit the town authorities to sue the liquor-dealers for the cost of maintaining pauperized drunkards, but the claim is quite within the logic of the principle. Intoxication in a public place, since it endangers the public peace, is also an acknowledged basis for interference by the community.

When it is conceded that a man’s drinking habits may become the business of another person because of damage to the material interests of any person or of the community, and because of injury to the moral interests of his own family, there is still another kind of interest which is asserted by those who answer affirmatively the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” A man who has no [p.150] family, who cannot harm himself by drink because he is a total abstainer, who is not responsible for the welfare of any children from whose vision he wishes to have liquor banished, will still claim an interest in another man’s food habits on the ground that liquor is harmful to mankind. It is not harmful to himself, for he drinks none of it; he has himself suffered no damage for which he could hold drinker or purveyor liable. If liquor legislation had been worked out patiently through the development of civil law this man would never have made himself a place in court. He would have been told that so long as his object was the improvement of his neighbor, not the protection of himself and family, the level upon which he should work was the level of persuasion. As things stand at present, we have no way of knowing what proportion of the forces backing Prohibition consist of people who are trying to do good to people who do not want to have good done to them. It is this kind of interest that makes Prohibition a “noble” experiment. If the liquor regime were [p.151] based upon machinery for redressing actual individual grievances, and satisfying real claims for personal damage, it would at once be less noble and more stable.

It appears now, in our present experience, that the law relating to the use of liquor neglects that principle of specialized responsibility, of correspondence between qualifications and privileges, which is axiomatically applied to our productive economy, and which is an expression of one of the principles underlying the organization of society – the principle of specialization or division of labor. This lacuna in the system of liquor control appeared when the transition was made directly from intervention on the level of persuasion to intervention on the level of police compulsion, without passing through the preparatory stage of defining the extent of an individual’s right to drink, and clarifying the nature of the interests which a third party may claim in a transaction between a buyer and seller of liquor. Had the law passed through this stage, it would have [p.152] accommodated itself to the elementary fact that some people use liquor without abusing it, while others do not. The law would then have worked out a very definite and acceptable answer to the question whether, under such and such circumstances, it is anybody’s business what I eat or drink. [p.153]