Popular phrases and the press in the South habitually put a gloss upon many of these crimes by calling them "duels"; but a careful study of newspaper cuttings shows that the old-fashioned affairs of honor with seconds and exactly similar weapons, measured distance, and the word to fire, have almost disappeared. Nearly all the affrays in which the murdered man is conscious of his danger are simply street fights, in which each man lodges in the body of the other as many shots as he can before he himself sinks down wounded. It can hardly be considered an affair of honor when Mr. John D. Twiggs, of Albany, Ga., walks through the streets with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, looking for Mr. J. B. Palmer, who has gone home to arm himself. Even this uneven kind of warfare is less frequent than the outright assassination of one white man by another. Where was Southern chivalry when Gonzales, the editor of the _Columbia State_, was in 1902 killed in the open street before he could draw his pistol, by Lieutenant-Governor Tillman of South Carolina, about whom the editor had been telling unpleasant truths? Where do you find the high-toned Southern gentleman when a man walks up to a total stranger, seizes him, and with the remark, "You are the man who wanted to fight me last night," plunges his knife into the victim's back. The newspapers are full of the shooting of men through windows, of their disappearance on lonely roads, of the terror that walketh by night, and the pestilence that waiteth at noonday. Then there are the numerous murders of friend by friend, on all kinds of frivolous occasions; a man trespasses on another man's land, goes to apologize, and is shot; another makes a joke which his friend does not appreciate, and there is nothing for it but pistols. The feeling that a man must assert his dignity at the end of a revolver was revealed in New Orleans in 1908 when Inspector Whittaker, head of the police, with five of his men, walked into the office of the _New Orleans World_, which had criticised his enforcement of the liquor laws, struck the editor in the face and several times shot at him. After he had taken such pains to vindicate the majesty of the law, it seems a hardship that his superiors compelled the Inspector to resign. There is hardly a part of the civilized world where homicide is so common as in the South, and the crime is quite as frequent in the cities as in the back country. Pitched battles by white men with policemen and with sheriffs are not uncommon; and sometimes three or four bodies are picked up after such a fight.