Dutiful Children

Before Tradition Four was written, the groups around New York had settled that no group answers to another, not even the one that started it. Bill W. told the story in 1947 (A.A. pamphlet P-17, p. 20). The Manhattan club had nurtured the first suburban groups. As they grew they found their own rooms and their own friends. The club ran a central meeting and paid a secretary who took calls for the whole area, so, Bill admitted, New Yorkers thought "our outlying groups ought financially to support the Manhattan club; dutiful children should look after their" parents. The groups never argued. They simply decided for themselves: "Though many outlying A.A. members personally contributed to the 24th Street Club, nary a cent did their respective groups ever send in." Nary a cent means not one cent. Members gave as they chose; the groups kept their money for their own affairs, and nobody could make them do otherwise. That is the Long Form's first sentence before it was written down (Big Book, p. 563): each group "should be responsible to no other authority than its own conscience." Today the parent may be a big meeting, an office or a program that started a group and still expects it to obey. Test it tonight: ask whether any older group, office or person can tell your group what to do with its basket.