feeling that has been at the bottom of most duels since duels passed out
of use as a mode of determining guilt or innocence, or of deciding
questions as to property, or position, or title. In the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries duels were chiefly the remedy for
wounded honor, as they are when they are rarely fought nowadays. True
there was the duel fought between two gentlemen "to prevent the
inconvenience of their both addressing the same lady"; but the duel for
that reason pure and simple was always comparatively rare, as, owing to
the infirmity of human nature, the agreement in opinion of the lady and
the disagreement as to the disposition to be made of her were almost
sure to take the form of a more reasonable if not more deadly cause of
quarrel.
--But society--that is, society in which Anglo-Saxon modes of thought
and feeling prevail--says that no matter what the provocation, or how
great the sense of wrong, the duel shall not be; it has been made a
crime in some if not in most of such communities even to send a
challenge. This is done on grounds of public policy and of morality, and
not, as some persons seem to think, because killing in a duel is murder.
Murder is more than a mere killing, and is in its essence entirely
inconsistent with the fact that the person killed voluntarily placed
himself, and generally with much trouble and at great inconvenience, in
the way of his death. The duel is in fact a sort of _hari-kari_, or
happy release, as our Japanese friends have well phrased it, but it is
with the coöperation of a second party who voluntarily places himself in
similar peril, the happy release being in both cases from the stigma of
dishonor. This is shown very clearly by the distinction which is drawn
in general estimation between the man who challenges because he has
suffered an insult or an injury to his family honor, and one who does so
from a feeling of revenge and with the intent to rid himself of a hated
opponent, as for example in the case of Aaron Burr in his duel with
Alexander Hamilton. That was more than half a century ago, when there
were no such laws against duelling as now exist; but Burr, although he
rid himself of his hated rival on what was called the field of honor,
was from that day a degraded, detested, ruined man. If Hamilton had
offered him a personal indignity, or had injured him in his family
relations, the result of the duel would have added nothing to the weight
of disrepute under which Burr was already suffering. The whole world
recognizes this distinction, and there is hardly a man whose breeding
and habits make him what is rightly called a gentleman in the full sense
of the term, who, however his judgment may condemn the duellist who
fights because of an insult or an injury to family honor, does not feel
a certain sympathy with him. Notwithstanding the teachings of
Christianity, and the example of its founder as to the patient suffering
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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