if on the slightest occasion they are prepared to feel insulted, and then to put a bullet or a charge of buckshot into somebody else's body. Such young people should be taught well, by precept and example, to appreciate the difference between a gentleman and a ruffian. They will then perceive that, in point of fact, a ruffian is easily and frequently “insulted” by a ruffian, but a true gentleman is very rarely insulted by another true gentleman. When one of these rare cases happens there are almost always methods of composition short of violence, and honorable to both parties. When a gentleman is insulted by a ruffian he will only lower his own dignity by adopting the ruffian's method of settling a quarrel. When ruffians insult one another they should not be permitted by any decent person to believe that respectable society will regard them as gentlemen if they fight each other with revolvers or shot guns, and thus settle their quarrel in a ruffianly way.
No community, and no member of it, should be permitted to forget that it is the great office of the law to redress wrongs and to protect the individual against assaults upon his rights, his honor, his property and his life. Your trouble is in a great measure that there are so many persons among you who think they can not, or they ought not, to intrust to the law and its organs affairs in which they have any personal feeling and interest, and that “taking the law in one's own hand” is regarded with too encouraging a leniency by public sentiment. It is the characteristic mark of civilized society that the individual looks to the law for his protection and the enforcement of his rights, while the habitual resort to violence by self-help is the equally characteristic mark of the barbarous state.
Constant self-help by force and violence in resenting insults or in enforcing claims of right may have been considered “chivalry” some centuries ago. But that kind of chivalry has been outgrown by a higher civilization.
