vogue long after its folly was seen and admitted, even by those who felt obliged to recognize the code. Duelling was attacked by reason, sarcasm, and eloquence, long with little apparent avail. The best cure was to withhold all sympathy both from the murderer and the murdered. The death of Hamilton at the hand of Burr excited national sympathy; yet why, with his more than ordinary insight into the absurdities of the practice, and his more than ordinary abhorrence of it, he should be entitled to extraordinary pity in the display of his weakness I cannot understand.
Why is it that when of all animals, civilized man alone finds a code of laws necessary to his social existence, that in his fighting attributes the nearer he approaches to bull-dog pluck and game-cock endurance, the nearer he imitates the prizefighter and the savage in his kilhng qualities, the more manly a man is he ? In fighting, points of emulation and honor are taken from beasts, but in the necessities of government and law even beasts and savages may well hold us in contempt.
When Khio; John of Eng^land, for the health of his soul, as he affirms, though in truth for the safety of his head, reluctantly granted his mailed barons the magna charta, the keystone of English liberty, as Hallam calls it, was laid. When Martin Luther raised his protest against the iniquities and errors of the church by nailing his theses to the door of the Schlosskirke at Wllrtenberg, the bull of excommunication that followed enfranchised half Christendom. When Thomas Jefferson's declaration of independence was passed by the congress assembled at Philadelphia, the latest and fairest type of liberty appeared, stainless, save one foul blot, and that by the emancipation proclamation of Abraham Lincoln was washed away. We who inherit the fruits of these several displays of progressional phenomena, and which embody all the benefits of civil and religious liberty ; we whose government is the mildest under which civilized man has
