hand, Desglands seized it and whispered:  Sir, I take it as given.  The next day Desglands appeared with a large piece of black sticking-plaster upon his right cheek.  In the duel which followed, Desglands severely wounded his rival; upon which he reduced the size of the plaster.  When his rival recovered, they had another duel; Desglands drew blood again, and again made his plaster a little smaller; and so on for five or six times.  After every duel Desglands’ plaster grew less and less, until at last his rival.]

From what I have said it must be quite evident that the principle of knightly honor has no essential and spontaneous origin in human nature.  It is an artificial product, and its source is not hard to find.  Its existence obviously dates from the time when people used their fists more than their heads, when priestcraft had enchained the human intellect, the much bepraised Middle Age, with its system of chivalry.  That was the time when people let the Almighty not only care for them but judge for them too; when difficult cases were decided by an ordeal, a Judgment of God; which, with few exceptions, meant a duel, not only where nobles were concerned, but in the case of ordinary citizens as well.  There is a neat illustration of this in Shakespeare’s Henry VI.[1] Every judicial sentence was subject to an appeal to arms—­a court, as it were, of higher instance, namely, the Judgment of God:  and this really meant that physical strength and activity, that is, our animal nature, usurped the place of reason on the judgment seat, deciding in matters of right and wrong, not by what a man had done, but by the force with which he was opposed, the same system, in fact, as prevails to-day under the principles of knightly honor.  If any one doubts that such is really the origin of our modern duel, let him read an excellent work by J.B.  Millingen, The History of Dueling.[2] Nay, you may still find amongst the supporters of the system,—­who, by the way are not usually the most educated or thoughtful of men,—­some who look upon the result of a duel as really constituting a divine judgment in the matter in dispute; no doubt in consequence of the traditional feeling on the subject.

But leaving aside the question of origin, it must now be clear to us that the main tendency of the principle is to use physical menace for the purpose of extorting an appearance of respect which is deemed too difficult or superfluous to acquire in reality; a proceeding which comes to much the same thing as if you were to prove the warmth of your room by holding your hand on the thermometer and so make it rise.  In fact, the kernel of the matter is this:  whereas civic honor aims at peaceable intercourse, and consists in the opinion of other people that we deserve full confidence, because we pay unconditional respect to their rights; knightly honor, on the other hand, lays down that we are to be feared, as being determined at all costs to maintain our own.