CHAPTER XXIV.

DUELLING.

Falstaff. Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour pricks me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word, honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o'Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it; therefore I'll none of it; honour is a mere 'scutcheon and so ends my catechism.

THE time is past when to an average intellect the necessity exists of denouncing duelling, and we have now only to regard with astonishment the bondage of our ancestors to this folly. In the evolution of progress, fashion, that is to say actively expressed opinion or belief, is constantly undergoing change; indeed, change of belief, and corresponding action, is progress. And as some of the beliefs of past ages are to us absurdities so gross that we can only wonder how some minds could for a moment have entertained them, so will certain of our creeds and conduct appear to generations following.

Take for example woman; along the highways of history how variable her condition! Alternately slave and saint, now she is the drudge and chattel of man and now his companion and idol. To us the strangest of all strange passions that ever blotted the human heart, seems that from which sprung the cruel treatment of women which formed a prominent feature in ancient and half-civilized warfare. What to us could possibly seem more unnatural than the picture of an enraged soldier in whom blind fury had so swal

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lowed all other passions that he should delight to drag by the hair about the streets of a conquered city its fair daughters in torn robes and with bleeding limbs ?

Then there is the institution of slavery, which within these few centuries had half the world for its supporters, that most anomalous of social anomalies, which under the laws of man enable man to hold man as merchandise, to own him, order him, bind him, beat him, kill him-no one to-day openly upholds human slavery as in the abstract right but would blush for his opinion did he but know the depth of his own ignorance and error.

The origin of the duello may be sought in that savage sentiment of justice which made every individual the indicator of his rights and the avenger of his wrongs. Before the coalescence of wandering tribes, and in the absence of a central power embodying the delegated right of individuals, that which is now the ultima ratio regum, was then the right of member of the patriarchal association.

every

Thence the sentiment assumed the form of superstition. The earlier methods of determining guilt were no less imperfect than those at present in force. Sufferers saw that governors and judges appointed to arbitrate between accuser and accused were not infallible; consequently appeal to a higher power direct, in the form of combat, became a custom. When the intellect was so far emancipated as to perceive that the almighty did not interpose the finger of justice in these trials of brute force, the practice had already so fastened itself upon society as a fashion, that for centuries neither right nor reason was able wholly to eradicate it.

It was during the age of chivalry when tilts and tournaments encouraged a display of personal prowess, and fostered the worship of courage and punctilio, that the duel assumed its most magnificent proportions. In legal proceedings it sometimes took the place of an oath. Public opinion kept the practice in

vogue long after its folly was seen and admitted, even by those who felt obliged to recognize the code. Duelling was attacked by reason, sarcasm, and eloquence, long with little apparent avail. The best cure was to withhold all sympathy both from the murderer and the murdered. The death of Hamilton at the hand of Burr excited national sympathy; yet why, with his more than ordinary insight into the absurdities of the practice, and his more than ordinary abhorrence of it, he should be entitled to extraordinary pity in the display of his weakness I cannot understand. Why is it that when of all animals, civilized man alone finds a code of laws necessary to his social existence, that in his fighting attributes the nearer he approaches to bull-dog pluck and game-cock endurance, the nearer he imitates the prizefighter and the savage in his killing qualities, the more manly a man is he? In fighting, points of emulation and honor are taken from beasts, but in the necessities of government and law even beasts and savages may well hold us in contempt.

When King John of England, for the health of his soul, as he affirms, though in truth for the safety of his head, reluctantly granted his mailed barons the magna charta, the keystone of English liberty, as Hallam calls it, was laid. When Martin Luther raised his protest against the iniquities and errors of the church by nailing his theses to the door of the Schlosskirke at Würtenberg, the bull of excommuniIcation that followed enfranchised half christendom. When Thomas Jefferson's declaration of independence was passed by the congress assembled at Philadelphia, the latest and fairest type of liberty appeared, stainless, save one foul blot, and that by the emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln was washed away. We who inherit the fruits of these several displays of progressional phenomena, and which embody all the benefits of civil and religious liberty; we whose government is the mildest under which civilized man has

yet lived, being imposed unconditionally by ourselves; we whose beliefs are unshackled, and whose intellects are wanton as the air-were it an attribute of humanity to be absolutely free, surely we might boast our freedom.

But absolute freedom is not an attribute of humanity, or if it be, the germ of such freedom does not appear. Since the days of feudal serfdom, of trial by combat, of inquisition and impositions, some progress has been made, but progress only of certain kinds and in certain directions. Palpable bondage we object to, and thanks to our forefathers are fairly enough rid of, but bondage impalpable, as far exceeding the other as the infinite exceeds the finite, yet remains. Fetters which we cannot feel we wear as gracefully as ever.

And no fetters imposed by the tyranny of fashion on stupid, ignorant man have been more galling to the wearers, have been worn with less comfort, bringing upon those under bondage to it that very contempt to avoid which they subjected themselves to it, rendering them by means of their unhappy adornment all the more ridiculous in the eyes of all sensible mennone more absurd and wicked than the duello.

Nor may we yet boast our freedom from it. Though by every rightminded member of society a duellist and no less those who aid and abet him-is regarded a murderer, the slave of a savage superstition civilized by senseless fashion, and is denounced as a thing vile and contaminating, yet the wars which myriads of men indulge in as the ultimate appeal in the settlement of their differences is but another phase of the same superstition.

What can there be more hateful and unholy, what can there be less in accord with their profession, and the spirit of the divine Christ which they aim to inculcate, than for ministers of the gospel, ranged on either side of a bloody arbitration, to mount their pulpits and solemnly invoke the god of battles to give them victory for the justness of their cause and the

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glory of his name? "Very wonderful!" as Dr Johnson would say. "Would that it were impossible.”

This is exactly what individual combatants did a few centuries ago, and which we now so righteously condemn. The only vital difference between war and the duello is that one is a national and the other an individual affair; and we are not yet sufficiently advanced in reason to realize that what is wrong in a unit of the nation is wrong in the nation. True, when the units of society delegate their rights to a general government acting for the common good, it is their duty to leave them there, and not to interfere with the functions of government by breaking its laws in the effort to right their own wrongs. Society alone possesses the right to chastise. But should the government become impotent or corrupt, and fail to deal justly with the individuals composing it, then the individuals may withdraw the rights delegated, and act for themselves if they have the power. Either duelling is right or war is wrong.

In Christian countries the actions of men are measured by two tests, the approbation of the creator, and the happiness of the creature, though as the subject is more closely inspected, one test appears to be equivalent to the other. How much needless dispute there has been about reason and revelation, their contradictions and absurdities. Between the two there is no discord, else reason is unreason and revelation a lie. The law of nature and of morality and the law of God are one; not that God and nature are thereby made one, but nature's law and nature's morals are God's law and morals.

Some call this appeal to battle God's plan, and so, indeed, it is; else in place of this now apparently only way, he would appoint some other. Probably religious wars have exceeded all others in extent and intensity among civilized nations. Now, why should God wish a hundred thousand of his creatures in God's name to slay another hundred thousand who assemble