dare not listen to conscience, to humanity, to right or reason. Soul and sense alike are sunk in a slough of brute persistence. Disciplhie demands it, we are told; and the more fully this dehumanizing process has been carried out, the more effective the army. The brutalization of the man is the first step; then infuse a fiendish spirit, and place all under the restrictions of necessary forms, and you have an organization fit for scientific slaughter. And the more to blind our eyes to the hideous creation, we make it the nation's moral ideal. Courage becomes synonomous with virtue; whatever interferes with the growth and exercise of courage is deemed vicious. With the ancient Romans the culture of the fine arts was regarded a vice.
The sentiment as found in the duel is much more frivolous. The bravery of the duellist is bravado; his heroism is based on pusillanimous timidity. No man whose hate is so deep-seated and vindictive as to be satiated only by another's blood, will place his own life within the range of equal probabilities of sacrifice unless driven to it by that power most appalling to its votaries, public opinion. Cowardice underlies the couraoje of the duellist. He fio;hts because he dare not refuse. Religion, right, reason, are swallowed in the abject terror inspired by the frown of his associates. Half crazed, it may be, in the performance of his unwelcome obligation, he stands before his adversary the captive slave of cowardice, whose uncontrollable thoughts seem to whirl him along in frenzied dance like an Orestes or a Hamlet.
To all such scarecrows as society courage, the cutthroats of the Californian Inferno were profoundly indifferent. Did one wish to kill another, one sought the other and slew on sight. Or, if fired by ambition, the informal duellist might give notice that he was then upon the war path, and should shoot a certain man if not first shot by him. But it was only where murder was raised to a fine art, as among journahsts,
