rse had availed, to make one of the bravest men in the
service a mere panic-haunted, and, in a moral sense, almost a paralytic
wreck. He that, whilst his hand was unstained with blood, would have
faced an army of fiends in discharge of his duty, now fancied danger in
every common rocking of a boat: he made himself at times, the subject of
laughter at the messes of the junior and more thoughtless officers: and
his hand, whenever he had occasion to handle a spy-glass, shook, (to use
the common image,) or, rather, shivered, like an aspen tree. Now, if a
regular tribunal, authenticated, by Parliament, as the fountain of law,
and, by the Sovereign, as the fountain of honour, were, under the very
narrowest constitution, to apply itself merely to a review of the whole
conduct pursued by the seconds, even under this restriction such a
tribunal would operate with great advantage. It is needless to direct
any severity to the conduct of the principals, unless when that conduct
has been outrageous or wanton in provocation: supposing anything
tolerably reasonable and natural in the growth of the quarrel, after the
quarrel is once 'constituted,' (to borrow a term of Scotch law,) the
principals, as they are called with relation to the subject of dispute,
are neither principals nor even secondaries for the subsequent
management of the dispute: they are delivered up, bound hand and foot,
into the hands of their technical 'friends'; passive to the law of
social usage as regards the general necessity of pursuing the dispute;
passive to the directions of their seconds as regards the particular
mode of pursuing it. It is, therefore, the seconds who are the proper
objects of notice for courts of honour; and the error has been, in
framing the project of such a court, to imagine the inquiry too much
directed upon the behaviour of those who cease to be free agents from
the very moment that they become liable to any legal investigation
whatever: simply as quarrellers, the parties are no objects of question;
they are not within the field of any police review; and the very first
act which brings them within that field, translates the responsibility
(because the free agency) from themselves to their seconds. The whole
_questio vexata_, therefore, reduces itself to these logical moments,
(to speak the language of mathematics:) the two parties mainly concerned
in the case of duelling, are Society and the Seconds. The first, by
authorising such a mode o