This, my Lords, is an age of recurrence to first principles, a period unexampled in the annals of the world. The shackles of ages are falling off, and the human intellect is rising up, unconscious of its strength, and likely, in pure ignorance how to restrain and economize that strength, to rend asunder the bones, the muscles, the ligaments which are alike its prison, and the necessary instruments of its energy and activity; in other words, to burst through and destroy the whole framework of society. To preserve that framework, to discipline that awakening strength, and to direct it to those high and noble purposes, which, from the elevation on which we now stand, we may see opening out before us in long vistas, as it were, of untrodden enterprise in the map of God’s providence, education must be resorted to; not that spurious education which draws its theory and its practice alike from the dust it studiously looks down upon, whose wisdom is of the earth, earthy—but that which God intended when he distinguished man from the beasts that perish, by creating him with his face erect to heaven, in the image of his Maker. If society is to be preserved, it must be Christianized. Your Lordships have acknowledged this great truth by your exertions to preserve the Christian principle in education. England owes you much for all you have done, for all you are still doing in this great cause. But it would be mockery to hold forth the decalogue with one hand, and with the other a charter of legitimation to that spurious offspring of human vice and folly, which, involving as it does a direct transgression not of one only, but of almost every law in the decalogue, virtually annuls it. And this charter your Lordships sign—the good that you have done your inconsistency may undo—if in the remotest degree you indirectly sanction the system in question. The expediency of enacting prohibitory laws against duelling, such as exist in some foreign countries, must necessarily be left to the wisdom of the united Houses to determine; it would probably be decided in the negative, and perhaps rightly so. But a far more efficient remedy is in your Lordships’ own hands, as the highest court of honour in the kingdom,—the capital of the column of English nobility,—the sun, as it were, whose lustre and the spots that obscure its disk are alike reflected by that class of society in which the evil complained of has hitherto chiefly prevailed. Your influence on the “public opinion” of this class is immense. Let your Lordships simply declare duelling to be disgraceful, and it becomes so.