“Why, make up your minds--or our minds I should say, for I am a Virginian now with the best of you--whether we will or will not permit duelling, and make and enforce the laws accordingly. If duelling is right let us recognize it and put an end to our hypocritical paltering with it. I’m not sure that in the present condition of society and opinion that would not be the best course to pursue. But if we are not ready for that, if we are to go on legislating against the practice, for heaven’s sake let us make laws that can be enforced, and let us enforce them. The little incident I have related is significant in its way, but it doesn’t suggest the half or the quarter or the one-hundredth part of the absurdity of our dealing with this question.” “Tell me about the rest of it,” responded Archer, “and then I shall have some questions to ask you.” “Well, as to the rest of it, you have only to look at the facts. Years ago the Virginia Legislature went through the solemn process of enacting that no person should be eligible to a seat in either house of our law making body, who had been in any way concerned in a duel, either as principal or second, since a date fixed by the statute. If that meant anything it meant that in the opinion of the Legislature of Virginia no duellist ought to be permitted to become a lawgiver. It was a statute prescribing for those who have committed the crime of duelling precisely the same penalty of disfranchisement that the law applies to those who have committed other felonies. But there was this difference. The laws forbidding other felonies, left open an opportunity to prove them and to convict men of committing them, while the law against duelling carefully made it impossible to convict anybody of its violation. To cover that point, the Legislature enacted that every man elected to either house of that body, should solemnly make oath that he had not been in any wise engaged in duelling since the date named in the statute. Again the lawgivers were not in earnest, for every year since that time men who have been concerned in duelling within the prohibited period have been elected to the Legislature; and every year the Legislature’s first act has been to bring forward the date of the prohibition and admit to seats in the law making body all the men elected to it who have deliberately defied and broken the law. It deals in no such fashion with men disfranchised for the commission of any other crime. Is not all this in effect an annual declaration by the Legislature that its laws in condemnation of duelling do not mean what they say? Is it not a case in which a law is enacted to satisfy one phase of public sentiment and deliberately nullified by legislative act in obedience to public sentiment of an opposite character?” “It certainly seems so. And yet I do not see what is to be done. You said just now that perhaps it would be best to legalize duelling. Would not that be legalizing crime?”