never resort to capital punishment. The Omniscient alone can tell how far the disease has gone, and to what extent the unfortunate being was really responsible for his actions to his follow men."] Is, or is not, a trial in this country for duelling to be regarded as a Farce following a Tragedy? There are those who say that it is; but we are not of the number. Such trials often greatly excite the public mind, and array opinions and prejudices against each other in such a manner as to disturb and derange the judgment. Then more or less is expected from the law, and its administration, than is right. If the heated public should have prepared itself for a conviction, loud and violent is its reclamation against an acquittal, especially if it have been brought about by what are styled technical objections, and _vice versâ_. They forget, under the impetuous impulses of a sense of natural justice, that settled rules of legal procedure must be observed indifferently on all occasions, if even-handed justice is to be administered in a court of justice. How did these rules come to be settled? They are the results of centuries of experience--of ten thousand instances of the advantage, nay, the absolute necessity, for observing them. If it could be imagined with any, even the slightest foundation of truth, that those sworn to decide according to the law and the facts had wilfully shut their eyes to the one or the other--or, either directly or indirectly, connived at an evasion of the letter or a violation of the spirit of the law, in order to secure a particular result--then there is no power in language adequate fitly to denounce so deliberate and awful a perjury, so monstrous an outrage on the administration of justice.