Saturday, June 21, 2014

What you call it matters - to them

Our terms moonshiner and moonshining are not used in the mountains. Here an illicit distiller is called a blockader, his business is blockading, and the product is blockade liquor. Just as the smugglers of old Britain called themselves free-traders, thereby proclaiming that they risked and fought for a principle, so the moonshiner considers himself simply a blockade runner dealing in contraband. His offense is only malum prohibitum [wrong because prohibited], not malum in se [wrong in itself].

(from Our Southern Highlander, by Horace Kephart)

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