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. For this statement I might cite authorities beginning with the infancy of the law, and not ending even with a late decision of the Superior Court of New York, where an inn is defined to be “a public house of entertainment _for all who choose to visit it_,”[188]--which differs very little from the descriptive words of Holinshed. The summary of our great jurist, Judge Story, shows the law:-- “An innkeeper is bound to take in _all travellers and wayfaring persons_, and to entertain them, if he can accommodate them, for a reasonable compensation.… If an innkeeper improperly refuses to receive or provide for a guest, he is liable to be indicted therefor.”[189] Chancellor Kent states the rule briefly, but with fulness and precision:-- “An innkeeper cannot lawfully refuse to receive guests to the extent of his reasonable accommodations; nor can he impose unreasonable terms upon them.”[190] This great authority says again, quoting a decided case:--