And when is honor at stake? This inquiry opens again the argument with which I commenced, and with which I hope to close. Honor can be at stake only where justice and beneficence are at stake; it can never depend on egg-shell or straw; it can never depend on any hasty word of anger or folly, not even if followed by vulgar violence. True honor appears in the dignity of the human soul, in that highest moral and intellectual excellence which is the nearest approach to qualities we reverence as attributes of God. Our community frowns with indignation upon the profaneness of the duel, having its rise in this irrational _point of_ _honor_. Are you aware that you indulge the same sentiment on a gigantic scale, when you recognize this very point of honor as a proper apology for War? We have already seen that justice is in no respect promoted by War. Is True Honor promoted where justice is not? The very word Honor, as used by the world, fails to express any elevated sentiment. How immeasurably below the sentiment of Duty! It is a word of easy virtue, that has been prostituted to the most opposite characters and transactions. From the field of Pavia, where France suffered one of the worst reverses in her annals, the defeated king writes to his mother, "All is lost, except _honor_." At a later day, the renowned French cook, Vatel, in a paroxysm of grief and mortification at the failure of two dishes for the table, exclaims, "I have lost my _honor_!" and stabs himself to the heart.[68] Montesquieu, whose writings are constellations of epigrams, calls honor a prejudice only, which he places in direct contrast with virtue,--the former being the animating principle of monarchy, and the latter the animating principle of a republic; but he reveals the inferiority of honor, as a principle, when he adds, that, in a well-governed monarchy, almost everybody is a good citizen, while it is rare to meet a really good man.[69] The man of honor is not the man of virtue. By an instinct pointing to the truth, we do not apply this term to the high columnar qualities which sustain and decorate life,--parental affection, justice, benevolence, the attributes of God. He would seem to borrow a feebler phrase, showing a slight appreciation of the distinctive character to whom reverence is accorded, who should speak of father, mother, judge, angel, or finally of God, as _persons of honor_. In such sacred connections, we feel, beyond the force of any argument, the mundane character of the sentiment which plays such a part in history and even in common life.