God more than man," and that "true courage is best evinced by the firm maintenance of our principles amidst all temptations and all trials." There was a time in Athens when a Senator was arraigned and punished for stifling a little bird that had taken refuge in his bosom, because the act was a crime against humanity; but in the nineteenth century of the Christian era there were gentlemen of high consideration who sneered at sentiments so in unison with the principles of the heathen Court of Areopagus, as pronounced by the distinguished Senator from South Carolina, in the presence of his peers; yet there were thousands who, as the press bore his words over the country, forgetting their want of sympathy in his political doctrines, felt to say:

"Honor to him, who, self-complete and brave
In scorn, can carve his pathway to the grave;
And, heeding naught of what men think or say,
Make his own heart his world upon the way."

PUBLIC SENTIMENT.

Duelling, as everybody knows, is a relic of the Dark Ages. Among the ignorant and superstitious people with whom it originated, and even under the institutions of chivalry, there may have been some excuse for it. But in the present state of civilization it cannot be justified; and this is the common remark. Yet it is still prevalent to an alarming extent, and simply because warworn veterans who are covered with scars, and judges in robes, and clergymen in surplices, and statesmen who lead legislative bodies or preside in cabinet councils, continue to afford it either their example or countenance. Such men form and direct public opinion, and can put an end to duelling at once and for ever. Gentlemen in other walks in life, of lofty sense of honor and of nice sensibility, feel compelled to send and accept hostile messages, contrary to their own judgment and sense of right, to avoid disgrace, and because they dare not reveal their abhorrence of the custom, in opposition to persons of superior rank or influence. I shall not soon forget a conversation with a friend who had fought to save himself from ruin. He was the challenged party, he said, and was too poor to decline; he must fight, starve, or remove to the North; the alternatives were dreadful; he accepted the call, horror-stricken, for he sinned against his own conscience, and with the eye of God fixed, as it seemed to him, intently upon him. The account of others is that this gen

tleman when on the ground bore himself most gallantly. His name is often spoken in New England, and I have heard him stigmatized as "a duellist," and as thus "unworthy of respect." It is not so. I know him intimately, and bear willing witness that, in the circle of my friends, there is not one more exemplary in his daily life, or who, in my judgment, strives more earnestly to conform to the rules of Christian duty. In another instance, I recall the remark of a personage of high rank in one of the planting States, who, in reply to an observation touching the two marked distinctions between Northern and Southern institutions, rejoined, "True, but which do you think the worst, black men in bondage to white men, or white men in bondage to the pistol?" We of the non-duelling States plume ourselves upon our freedom from the barbarous practice, and claim that we are so in consequence of our superior morality ; but I have yet to be convinced that we owe our exemption to any such difference. Let Northern members of Congress agree in a body that personalities in debate, - let husbands, and fathers, and brothers, associate, that the seduction of wives, and daughters, and sisters, let gentlemen, generally, resolve that slanderous or impertinent words, shall hereafter be avenged in private combat, and duels would become as frequent among us as anywhere else. Public sentiment is omnipotent; and, to use a homely expression, is "manufactured to order " by a few prominent men in every community. The Roundheads of England, from whom we are descended, could justly plead religious scruples in answer to cartels from the Cavaliers, for they conformed to no customs, indulged in no fashions, inconsistent with an austere, with a self-denying faith. But it is sheer hypocrisy in us, as a people, to aver that we are restrained from the use of the pistol by principle. At home it is honorable to appeal to the tribunals to redress every wrong, and judges and juries are our common arbiters. Abroad, we forget law and appeal to lead, as often as others; and some of the most desperate duels mentioned in this volume were fought by New England men, in obedience to the sentiment around them.

Public opinion, it hardly need be said to the well-informed reader, rules the statute-book. In England, killing in a duel, whether by peer or commoner, is murder. These pages contain the names of many noble duellists who slew their antagonists; but though three of them - Lords Mohun, Warwick, and Byron—were tried, not one was punished. For a period of nearly

seventy years succeeding the last of these attempted examples, not a single peer was so much as put upon trial; and the case of Lord Cardigan, in 1841, who was arraigned for shooting at Captain Tuckett, embraces the whole account of judicial proceedings against noblemen who have been engaged in affairs of honor. Commoners have escaped with the same impunity. In Scotland, there has not been a single conviction for a century and a half. In England, during the last two hundred years, there may have been twelve or fifteen verdicts of murder by juries, but there has not been one execution of a survivor who killed his adversary in accordance with usage, or under the duello; while in the cases of unfair fighting, Major Campbell, and two or three others, have alone suffered the extreme penalty of the law. In fine, the courts have been mere umpires to interfere in "foul play." The judges have not always commenced life, as did Lord Norbury," with fifty pounds and a pair of hair-trigger pistols"; nor have they always provided seconds, as did one of them in the fatal combat between Boswell and Stuart; nor have twelve magistrates always been passive spectators of a fight, as were that exact number in the savage duel between Colclough and Alcock; nor have the presiding judges always told juries, as did Fletcher, "Gentlemen, it is my business to lay down the law to you, and I shall do so: where two persons go out to fight a duel, and one of them falls, the law says it is murder, and I tell you by law it is murder, but at the same time a fairer duel I never heard of in the whole course of my life"; but still I fear that these instances illustrate, with some approach to truth, the general feeling of the Bench of the British Isles in all past time; and it is scarcely an exaggeration to add, that witnesses, judges, juries, prosecuting officers, and the higher advisers of the crown, have united to prevent punishments under the laws against duelling. The consolation is, that duels in these isles are now rare between persons who give a direction to public sentiment.

In the United States, as in England, killing in a duel is murder; but here, as there, OPINION is superior to Law. Bennett, as far as I have been able to ascertain, is the only person who has been executed for taking the life of a fellow-man in single combat since we became a free people. In some States, the parties have seldom been held even to answer; in others, the inquiry in the courts has been confined to the single question of the "fairness of the fight"; and this point determined in favor of the survivor, acquittal has followed as a matter of course.

In one State, we find the judge of a court on the duelling ground as a principal; in another, an ex-governor is there as a second; in a third, we read of principals and seconds, attended by an immense concourse in carriages, on horseback, and on foot, passing through one of the largest cities, on their way to the appointed spot, without hindrance on the part of the magistrates; in a fourth, we are told of the deafening shout of the assembled crowd at the fall of both the combatants; and in a fifth, the judicial record shows the mockery of a sentence, against the parties who had completed their arrangements for a mortal strife, of a fine of one dollar and an imprisonment of one minute. Yet in these five States there are not only statute laws but constitutional provisions in the books adverse to this relic of the Dark Ages. We of the North denounce individual gentlemen, who meet one another to adjust their personal or political differences, in terms measured only by our respective powers of anathema, and we do wrong; for we forget that, if a gentleman at the South refuses to send or accept a challenge, he loses his position in society, and is sometimes shunned and hunted down. We should be just, even in our maledictions. It is not the individual man whom we should assail, but the PUBLIC OPINION which with its imperative voice demands him to hold his weapon at the breast of his fellow. It is not from choice, but in obedience to the tyrant CUSTOM, that persons who, until some trivial dispute severed, had ever loved one another, meet to maim and slay. Nor is duelling a criterion of bravery. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, of South Carolina, and one of the first characters of his time in America, said that he had “ seen " cowards fight duels; and Curran, in the exuberance of his wit, speaks of one of his antagonists who died in three weeks after their meeting, "of the report of his own pistol."

SIN AND ABSURDITY OF DUELLING.

45

REFLECTIONS ON THE EVE OF A DUEL.

I HAVE Somewhere read that Moreau made, and Wellington assented to, the remark, that commanders of large armies, however brave, weighed down by moral anxiety and reasonings upon the uncertainties of the result, hesitate, after all their combinations and arrangements have been completed, to make the final movement to bring on a battle. How similar the condition of statesmen and military men of distinction, when on the eve of private battle, the parting line to the unconscious wife sealed; the will executed and concealed from curious eyes; the thought of the dread event of the morrow and its issue; the resolution taken to reserve fire, or not to wound in a mortal part; and the last conversation for the night with the only friends intrusted with the momentous secret! What were the emotions of Thurlow, rapidly advancing at the bar, and with the vision of the Great Seal and the Wool-sack before him! of Canning, struggling for the premiership, but scorned by the aristocracy for the lowly position in life of his true-hearted and exemplary mother! of Pitt, whose ambitious policy grasped at bounding and balancing the kingdoms of all Europe! of Hamilton, the pride and hope of a hemisphere, and the "disciple on whose bosom " Washington had "leaned "! of Clay, as chivalrous as the ancient Bayard himself, and taunted to madness by the ferocity and malignity of party calumny of Decatur, gallant and generous to knight-errantry, yet pushed by malign influences to wrong a professional brother already crushed by an administration to conceal its own indolence and remissness!

SIN AND ABSURDITY OF DUELLING.

An elaborate argument to prove the WICKEDNESS of the custom is unnecessary, for that is admitted everywhere, and quite as often and as frankly among its unfortunate victims as among others. Nor, in omitting a discussion on the point thus generally conceded, shall I so far yield to the popular voice in some sec