Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 18.pdf/299

 272

THE GREEN BAG

he puts a stranger into a common room with other strangers and bids him sleep, the innkeeper must undertake his care and protection during the night, not merely against persons outside but against strange bedfellows within the inn. It is interesting to notice how history repeats itself in this case. A much later invention, the sleeping car, brought back to modern life some of the obsolete features of the life of the Middle Ages. A number of persons, strangers to one another, were received to sleep in a common room open to persons from out side. The existence of the same conditions imposed a similar responsibility and the proprietor of the sleeping car, like the inn keeper in the Middle Ages, was obliged to protect his guests as well as he could against danger from within or from without. The innkeeper's liabilitv did not exist in the case of a private chamber, into which only the guest who engaged it or friends brought into it by himself were allowed to enter. If a man engaged a room and control of it, and was given the key, the protection which the innkeeper was obliged to furnish him

was, therefore, merely against outsiders who might be permitted to break into the room without right. Against the inmates the guest had no right to call upon the innkeeper for protection. This is the reason of the stress laid in the old cases upon the fact that the innkeeper has given the guest the key ' of his room; this gift of key marked and symbolized the fact that the room was no longer in the innkeeper's disposal, that he could quarter no stranger in it, and that the guest and his friends alone could enter, and, therefore, against those who rightly entered the innkeeper undertook no respon sibility. The business of innkeeper having been carried on in this way the distinctive fea tures of the law are easily accounted for. The principles of the innkeeper's liability once being established have continued un changed until the present day; and the hotel keeper in the great cities of the United States derives his rights and traces his responsibilities to the host of the humble village inn of medieval England. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., April, 1906.