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The point of honor has been deemed of use To teach good manners and to curb abuse.
So wrote Cowper in his "Conversation," nearly a century ago, when duelling was beginning to go out of fashion, even among men who did not look upon it from a religious point of view. There is no doubt that the passage which these lines introduce did much to bring the custom of settling personal quarrels by single combat into disrepute. Cowper, the moral poet par excellence of the English language, attained this eminence chiefly because he wrote, not like a fanatic, or a canting pietist, but like a Christian gentleman and a man of sense. A man of family, he thought and felt as a gentleman, and addressed himself to gentlemen; and indeed, in his day poetry, at least of the quality that he produced, had very few readers outside the pale of gentry. His view of duelling is the one which now prevails in most communities of English blood in all parts of the world. Germans and Frenchmen and the Latin races generally still fight upon personal provocation, and in our late slave States and among the rude and fierce men who guard and extend our western borders, "misunderstandings" are settled by the bullet or the knife, and if not on the spot, with the weapon at hand, then in a regularly arranged duel in which the forms are entirely subordinate to the essentials of a bloody and vindictive contest. With these exceptions, however, duelling among the English-speaking people has come to be regarded as both folly and crime. Nothing could evince more strongly the change that has taken place in the moral sense of the world; for to resent an insult by a challenge to fight, and to accept such a challenge without a moment's hesitation, were once the highest duties of a gentleman. There was a reason for this; and without advocating or defending the practice of duelling, it may be questioned whether that reason has entirely disappeared.
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—Our readers need not fear that we are about to defend or to palliate the conduct of either of the parties to the recent affair which began in Fifth Avenue in New York and ended on the Maryland border; but the fact that that occurrence or series of occurrences has attracted the attention of the whole country, makes it a proper occasion of remark upon the questions involved in such encounters. And first we must set aside the Cowper view of the subject, not in its conclusion, but in its reasoning. For however Christian in sentiment and sound in its final judgment the passage in the "Conversation" may be, its author's position is not logically impregnable. For it rests upon the assumption embodied in the couplet—
Amoral, sensible, and well-bred man Will not affront me, and no other can.
But if this be true, it follows that a man cannot be insulted, which is an absurdity; for men are insulted, as we all know—and we are happy if we do not know it by experience. Moreover, men are insulted more frequently where the "code of honor" does not prevail than where it does; for that code is of use; and if it does not teach good manners, it certainly does curb abuse. The question to be decided is whether in the teaching of manners and the curbing of abuse by the alternative and arbitrament of bloody combat we are not paying too high a price for what we gain. To consider the example which is the occasion of our remark. A man is met in the street by another with whom he has been upon terms of social intercourse, and is there publicly whipped. He faces his assailant, resists, but is overcome because the assailant is the stronger and the more dexterous. What shall he do? Submit quietly? That may be Christian conduct; but whether it is good public policy, to say nothing more, may at least be questioned; for it would place the greater part of the community at the mercy of the strong brawling bullies. Two courses are open to a person so assailed—either to place the matter in the hands of the law, in a civil or a criminal suit, or to challenge the assailant. In most cases it may be admitted that the former course is the wiser and the better course. Where mere protection against personal injury is sought a police justice and a police officer are the effective as well as the lawful means. But there is something else to be considered. The mere personal injury may be slight, and there may be no fear of its repetition, and yet there is a wrong done that may rankle deeper than a wound. Personal indignity is something that most men of character and spirit feel more than bodily pain or than loss of money or of property. It is a sentimental grievance, and therefore one which the law cannot provide against or punish. It cannot be estimated in damages; none the less, therefore, but rather the more, does the man who suffers it take it to heart; none the less, therefore, but rather the more, do gentlemen set up barriers against it which, although invisible, and not even expressed, if indeed they are expressible in words, are more forbidding in their frown, more difficult of assault than the regular bulwarks of the law. It must be repeated that this wrong is not to be measured by the bodily injury or the bodily pain that is inflicted. Two men may be boxing or fencing, and one may severely injure the other; but no sense of wrong accompanies the injury, and that not because no injury was intended, but because no offence was meant; whereas the flirt of a kid glove across the face, or a word, may inflict a wrong that if not atoned for or expiated, may rankle through a man's whole life. To attempt to set aside or to do away with this feeling is quite useless: as well attempt to set aside or to do away with human nature. It is this 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 of indignity, notwithstanding the law, we all, or most of us, have the feeling that Barclay of Wry's battle-tried comrade had when he saw his old friend and heroic commander openly insulted by a throng of swashbucklers in the streets of Aberdeen, because he had become a Quaker, and which Whittier has expressed with such spirit in his poem on the subject, which is one of the few truly admirable ballads of modern days (although its author does not so class it), and which is, we are inclined to think, the most admirable of them all:
Woe's the day, he sadly said, With a slowly shaking head, And a look of pity: Wry's honest lord reviled, Mock of knave and sport of child, In his own good city.
Speak the word, and master mine, As we charged on Tilly's line And his Walloon lancers, Smiting through their midst, we'll teach Civil look and decent speech To these boyish prancers.