Opinion of the Court. 328 U.S. They appeared on the premises during business hours. They had ocular evidence that a misdemeanor had been committed, a crime to which petitioner was an aider or abetter,12 since, according to the attendant, she made the illegal sales pursuant to petitioner's instructions. Since sales were being made without receipt of coupons from customers, it was fair to assume (unless, as was at no time suggested, the business was being liquidated) that petitioner somewhere had a supply of coupons adequate to replenish his storage tanks. The inspection which was made was an inspection of the tanks attached to the pumps. And the search was of the office adjacent to the pumps the place where petitioner transacted his business. Moreover, the officers demanded the coupons on the basis that they were property of the Government and that petitioner was merely the custodian of them. And there was no general, exploratory search. Only the contraband coupons were demanded; only coupons were taken. These facts distinguished this case from such cases as Amos v. United States, 255 U. S. 313, where officers without a search warrant swoop down on a private residence, obtain admission through the exertion of official pressure, and seize private property. The filling station was a place of business, not a private residence. The officers' claim to the property was one of right. For the coupons which they demanded to see were government property. And the demand was made during business hours. Whatever may be the limits of inspection under the regulations, law enforcement is not so impotent as to require officers, who have the right to inspect a place of business, to stand 12 Criminal Code § 332, 18 U. S. C. § 550, provides: "Whoever directly commits any act constituting an offense defined in any law of the United States, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, induces, or procures its commission, is a principal." 582 Opinion of the Court. mute when such clear evidence of criminal activity is known to them. Where the officers seek to inspect public documents at the place of business where they are required to be kept, permissible limits of persuasion are not so narrow as where private papers are sought. The demand is one of right. When the custodian is persuaded by argument that it is his duty to surrender them and he hands them over, duress and coercion will not be so readily implied as where private papers are involved. The custodian in this situation is not protected against the production of incriminating documents. Wilson v. United States, supra. The strict test of consent, designed to protect an accused against production of incriminating evidence, has no place here. The right of privacy, of course, remains. But, as we have said, the filling station was a place of business, not a private residence. The right to inspect existed. And where one is seeking to reclaim his property which is unlawfully in the possession of another, the normal restraints against intrusion on one's privacy, as we have seen, are relaxed. The District Court found, after hearing the witnesses, that petitioner consented that although he at first refused to turn the coupons over, he soon was persuaded to do so and that force or threat of force was not employed to persuade him. According to the District Court, the officers "persuaded him that it would be a better thing for him to permit them to examine" the coupons; "they talked him into it." We cannot say as a matter of law that that finding was erroneous. public character of the property, the fact that the demand was made during business hours at the place of business where the coupons were required to be kept, the existence of the right to inspect, the nature of the request, the fact that the initial refusal to turn the coupons over was soon followed by acquiescence in the demand-these circum The FRANKFURTER, J., dissenting. 328 U.S. stances all support the conclusion of the District Court. We accordingly affirm the judgment below without reaching the question whether but for that consent the search and seizure incidental to the arrest were reasonable. Affirmed. MR. JUSTICE JACKSON took no part in the consideration or decision of this case. MR. JUSTICE FRANKFURTER, with whom MR. JUSTICE MURPHY Concurs, dissenting. In its surface aspects this case concerns merely a squalid effort to evade the wartime system of gasoline rationing. But it should not be disposed of in that perspective. It is not the first petty little case to put to the test respect for principles which the founders of this nation deemed essential for a free society. For the case is directly related to one of the great chapters in the historic process whereby civil liberty was achieved and constitutionally protected against future inroads. The Court's decision, as I see it, presents this issue: May papers which an accused could not be compelled to produce even by a judicial process of a search warrant be taken from him against his will by officers of the law without such judicial process for use as evidence in a criminal prosecution against him? Judicial process may not compel the production of documents either because of the protection of the Fifth Amendment against selfcrimination, or, as in this case, because the authorization by Congress of search warrants is withheld in a situation like the present.' The Court apparently rules that because the gasoline business was subject to regulation, the 1 The petitioner was arrested for the sale of gasoline without coupons and at a price greater than that authorized by the Office of Price Administration ceilings; he was prosecuted for the illegal possession 582 FRANKFURTER, J., dissenting. search and seizure of such documents without a warrant is not an unreasonable search and seizure condemned by the Fourth Amendment. To hold that the search in this case was legal is to hold that a search which could not be justified under a search warrant is lawful without it. I cannot escape the conviction that such a view of the Fourth Amendment makes a travesty of it and of the long course of legislation in which Congress applied that Amendment. Where search is made under the authority of a warrant issued from a judicial source, the scope of the search must be confined to the specific authorization of the warrant. It cannot be that the Constitution meant to make it legally advantageous not to have a warrant, so that the police may roam freely and have the courts retrospectively hold that the search that was made was "reasonable," reasonableness being judged from the point of view of obtaining relevant evidence. I had supposed that that was precisely what the Fourth Amendment was meant to stop. "The Government could desire its possession only to use it as evidence against the defendant and to search for and seize it for such purpose was unlawful." Gouled v. United States, 255 U. S. 298, 310. There is indeed a difference between private papers and papers having also a public bearing. Private papers of an accused cannot be seized even through legal process because their use would violate the prohibition of the Fifth Amendment against self-crimination. So-called public papers-papers in which the public has an interest of gasoline ration documents. These offenses are misdemeanors. 56 Stat. 176, 179, 50 U. S. C. App. § 633 (5). The Espionage Act limits the issuance of search warrants to those in which the property sought was stolen or embezzled, used as a means of committing a felony, or used to aid illegally a foreign nation. 40 Stat. 217, 228, 18 U. S. C. § 612. The documents involved in this case do not come within any of these categories. FRANKFURTER, J., dissenting. 328 U.S. other than that which they may serve as evidence in a case may be seized, but like all other things in an individual's possession they can be seized only upon a properly safeguarded search. The amenability of corporate papers to testimonial compulsion means that a corporation, because it is a corporation, cannot make claim to the privilege of self-crimination. Nor can the custodian of corporate books immunize them against their production in court because they may also carry testimony against him. The Fourth Amendment does not give freedom from testimonial compulsion. Subject to familiar qualifications every man is under obligation to give testimony. But that obligation can be exacted only under judicial sanctions which are deemed precious to AngloAmerican civilization. Merely because there may be the duty to make documents available for litigation does not mean that police officers may forcibly or fraudulently obtain them. This protection of the right to be let alone except under responsible judicial compulsion is precisely what the Fourth Amendment meant to express and to safeguard. An even more fundamental issue lurks in the Court's opinion if a casual but explicit phrase about the locus of the search and seizure as "a place of business, not a private residence" is intended to carry relevant legal implications. If this is an indirect way of saying that the Fourth Amendment only secures homes against unreasonable searches and seizures but not offices-private offices of physicians and lawyers, of trade unions and other organizations, of business and scientific enterprises— then indeed it would constitute a sudden and drastic break with the whole history of the Fourth Amendment and its applications by this Court. See Olmstead v. United States, 277 U. S. 438, 477, and cases cited in footnotes 5, 6, and 7. I cannot believe that a vast area of civil |