might for a time be disregarded; or if some ingenious mechanic could construct a steam-engine which, by different movements, should perform the work of judge and jury, there would then be some chance that iron laws might be enforced. But while the old plan of manual labour is pursued—while judges and juries, and witnesses and counsel, are human beings, and live in society, it will be in vain to expect from them the enforcement of edicts which run counter to all their sympathies. Let it not be supposed that we think harshly of legislators; we do not; but they have to do only with abstractions. It is easy to fulminate the terrors of the law against A, B, C, or any or all of the letters in the alphabet; but it is a very different thing to execute those threats upon real men of flesh and blood. A, B, and C, have no eyes; A, B, and C, have no hands, organs, senses, affections, passions. They are not fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as men are. “If you prick them, they do not bleed; if you tickle them, they do not laugh; if you poison them, they do not die; and if you wrong them, they cannot revenge.” Poor A, B, and C, have neither mothers, mistresses, aunts nor sisters; they do not “appear at the bar in genteel mourning;” they are not “unfortunate gentlemen.” In short, they can awake no sympathies; and there is no possible reason why the law should not take its course in the cases of such wicked and daring offenders, except that these abstractions cannot be caught. With respect to one class of the community, officers in the army, the case is even more glaringly absurd and unjust; for, with regard to them, the laws of the land are actually at variance among themselves. By the Mutiny Act, the King has an “unlimited power to create crimes, and annex to them any punishment not extending to life or limb.”[10] If, then, he shall be found to have exercised the power in the punishment of officers for not fighting duels our position will be fully proved.[11] The intelligent reader must have been, at some time, struck with the mass of contradictions which, in one shape or other, has been offered to the world on the subject of duels; divines and law-givers crying murder; commentators[12] extolling the justice of laws which cannot be executed; historians[13] deducing effects which they call good, from causes which they call absurd; and lastly, the world at large, admitting all that can be said against duels, sometimes demanding sanguinary punishments, which they would shrink from seeing executed, and sometimes allowing that although they are shocking things, yet they are necessary “in a certain rank of life.”