The Ethics Rum-Running

Extract

There was romance in old-time smuggling, if the story-books speak true. There is precious Tittle in that present-day form of it called ‘rum-running,’ if James Barbican’s account is to be considered authoritative. It is a cold, hard business proposition, with abundant possibilities of trickery, fraud, bribery, and murder, as a background. That the ethics of rumfunning are, therefore, a somewhat complicated issue will not be surprising.

Why the general title of ‘rum-running’ has been adopted is a mystery. In point of fact, rum is seldom carried. The normal stock-in-trade is whiskey, with ‘brandy and wines for a side-line. It is probably ‘one of the many words used by the American journalist in his love of alliteration.’ The men engaged in the business are titled according to the part they play, and if there are heroes in the game at all they are the ‘rum-runners’ properly so-called. These are they who command the whiskey-ships which lie anchored twenty miles or so off land, contending with storms, pirates and mutiny; they who own the Seabright dories, those small cockle-shell speed-boats by means of which the cargo is landed, and play a lone hand against storms, fogs, revenue cutters, prohibition agents, police and ‘hijackers’; they who drive motor lorries at breakneck speeds for hundreds of miles at a stretch and who are, as often as not, shot down (‘bumped off’ in the slang phrase) either by police or hijackers.